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by Stephanie Neil, MA Editorial Staff   | Abstract: | Manufacturers looking for innovation in their production processes have found that using information from PLCs, DCSs and other data gatherers on the floor can help them look ahead, not behind. |
Polyethylene likes the cold, which is part of the reason NOVA Chemicals set up two resin plants in Joffre, Alberta, Canada. But recently, product output was not reaching its full potential in one of those plants, regardless of how low temperatures dipped. Given that market pressure, a global economy, and new product demands mandate that production processes consistently run at maximum capacity, NOVA Chemicals had a major challenge on its hands. Conventional wisdom suggested that to solve such a problem, the plant manager should collect data and analyze it to find the source of the capacity constraint. And that's exactly what an engineer at the NOVA Chemicals plant did -- downloading data from a historian and the distributed control system on a second-by-second basis for a full week. Gathering all of the information was easy. Making heads or tails of it, however, was taxing. "They knew there were cooling constraints," notes Alan Schrob, NOVA Chemicals' director of manufacturing excellence. "But it was so onerous to go through the volumes of data generated to figure out what was happening." [Click to continue] |