Sabyasachi Bhattacharyya from ABB elaborates on the seamless connection between the physical and digital world within ABB's digital suite. This integration empowers industrial players to efficiently oversee their extensive range of instrumentation devices and gain valuable insights that drive enhanced productivity and environmental advantages.
The industrial plant landscape has never been more dynamic or complex.
In this context, plant owners face the challenge of overseeing extensive arrays of installed instrumentation, consisting of a blend of outdated components and cutting-edge devices, encompassing relics of superseded technologies as well as the latest advancements in Industry 4.0 and Industrial IoT.
Each of these devices demands distinct management approaches.
Merely replacing outdated devices with newer, more intelligent technologies is costly, time-consuming, and occasionally not without risk. Furthermore, bridging the skills gap and training personnel in heterogeneous technologies of different eras incurs additional expenses.
Plant Operators Today – Doing More with Less
Industrial plants must possess the capability to swiftly respond and adapt to external variables, such as shifting regulatory burdens, elevated standards, increased thresholds of environmental responsibility and sustainability, and the pursuit of net zero.
A macroeconomic backdrop characterized by high inflation and escalating energy and raw material input costs is prompting a focus on marginal gains.
In the realm of operational costs for industrial plants, unplanned shutdowns resulting from component failures or malfunctions stand as the most significant expense.
Such occurrences rapidly deteriorate essential commercial objectives, including operational performance, return on assets, cost of ownership, time to benefit, and shareholder value.
According to the ARC Advisory Group, annual production suffers a 5 percent loss due to downtime and subpar product quality. The group further indicates that 80 percent of these losses are preventable, with 40 percent attributed to operator error.
Predicting the Future, While Managing Today’s Challenges
To enhance reliability and efficiency while minimizing unexpected downtime, plant operators require a comprehensive asset-performance monitoring and management platform.
ABB offers such a platform in the form of its digital suite of solutions, which enables remote-access monitoring of instrumentation devices, whether on-premise or in the cloud. Additionally, it provides cues for predictive maintenance schedules.
Image Credit: ABB Measurement & Analytics
Comprising three elements, ABB's digital suite aims to optimize plant operations. The first element is the Smart Device Manager, acting as a product configurator. It facilitates quick, easy, and secure configuration, installation, and commissioning of products based on site conditions.
It continuously monitors device parameters and establishes a cyber-secure infrastructure to enable real-time requests for remote services and expert support. Remote assistance is available if needed.
The second element, ABB AbilityTM SmartMaster, represents a next-generation remote condition-monitoring and verification platform compatible with ABB and other devices.
SmartMaster seamlessly bridges the physical and digital realms through IT/OT convergence. It remotely collects data from field devices without interrupting the industrial process, analyzes it, and delivers it directly to smartphones, tablets, or laptops.
This allows operators to monitor the real-time condition and performance of instrumentation devices.
The solution validates device health and confirms NAMUR status, providing customers with an overview of their installed base. SmartMaster is capable of working with various types of instruments, including both two-wire and four-wire devices, and can assess their health based on device-specific thresholds.
While its primary focus is plant-level operations, it can also aggregate data from multiple plants and offer a consolidated view of an entire plant fleet through cloud integration.
The trending function of SmartMaster becomes more accurate as it accumulates more data. This enables it to predict maintenance schedules precisely, allowing ABB service-assisted clients and self-service customers to plan service operations, order spare parts, and optimize device replacement.
In situations involving recurrent breakdowns or coincidental device malfunctions, SmartMaster can identify patterns of failure, provide in-depth analysis, and offer insights into appropriate remedial actions.
Getting Insights on the Entire Life Cycle of Instrumentation Device
If an issue requiring further investigation is detected by the SmartMaster, the ABB AbilityTM Verification for measurement devices can conduct a physical, on-site assessment of an individual device, providing a hardware health check.
This is the third component in the digital suite. By offering a more thorough health check compared to the SmartMaster, ABB AbilityTM Verification is capable of evaluating device accuracy and health within predetermined design parameters, subsequently confirming proper device operation.
Detailed test reports generated by ABB AbilityTM Verification can serve audit purposes and as evidence of quality control, complying with the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) records.
Through the assurance of operational health, Verification effectively mitigates the risk of production loss resulting from operator errors, facilitates avoidance of unplanned downtime, enhances lifecycle management, and minimizes the necessity for training.
SmartMaster and Verification complement each other by monitoring the condition of instrumentation devices. While SmartMaster provides a solution at the plant or fleet level, on-site or cloud-based, Verification enables a one-to-one device check.
SmartMaster focuses on software checks and performs simulations of various signals to assess the device's health during testing. On the other hand, Verification requires an on-site assessment with a physical connection between the device and a laptop.
For operators utilizing electromagnetic flowmeters, particularly in the water industry, the stringent regulatory environment governing water utilities necessitates device-specific Verification reports to obtain regulatory approval.
By providing customers with comprehensive information encompassing the entire lifecycle of an instrumentation device, from configuration to maintenance to predictive maintenance, ABB's digital suite extends device lifecycles, reduces unplanned downtime, minimizes training costs, and aids operators in overcoming the challenges prevalent in modern industrial plants.
This information has been sourced, reviewed and adapted from materials provided by ABB Measurement & Analytics.
For more information on this source, please visit ABB Measurement & Analytics.