4 Operational Challenges You Can Overcome with Insight

Written by Fiona Straton, Senior Marketing Lead, AVEVA

As the world experienced change at a speed and scale unprecedented in living history, it is hardly surprising that many of us are questioning how we can make things better. The overnight focus on digital and remote work has led to a global reimagining of what the “new normal” could be. Where previously it was often difficult to justify the investment into cloud and other transformative technologies, now is the time to seize the opportunity to change and adapt.

This is perhaps best summarized by McKinsey as “There’s no going back. The great acceleration in the use of technology, digitization, and new forms of working is going to be sustained.”

While this objective may seem both obvious and daunting, the fact remains that many companies still struggle to adopt digital technology at speed and scale. So how can industries such as manufacturing, water and wastewater, power or chemicals adapt, particularly when working with tight operating budgets?

One way is to identify the most common challenges and adopt a single, cost-effective solution to address them. In our experience, the top 4 challenges faced by industry can be easily solved by AVEVA Insight, our operations and asset management platform in the cloud.

Let’s explore four common challenges and how AVEVA Insight can be used to overcome them:

1. Unlocking critical data. Data is often trapped within on-premises systems such as historians, HMI and SCADA, and with a proliferation of IoT devices and sensors, it can be difficult to consolidate and contextualize data. This leads to frustration with out-of-date or missing information.

Built with Microsoft Azure[FS2] , AVEVA Insight is a native cloud platform for operations and asset management. It allows you to consolidate data from multiple systems such as HMI, SCADA or historians, edge devices and IIoT sensors so that you can gain complete visibility of your operations – securely – anywhere, anytime.

For instance, at Schneider Electric’s Lexington, Kentucky site – a World Economic Forum Lighthouse for Sustainable Digital Manufacturing – AVEVA Insight acts as a digital dashboard so that operators have instantaneous access to actionable intelligence. This has resulted in a 6% reduction in unplanned downtime since the solution was adopted.

2. Increasing collaboration. A side effect of trapped data is informational siloes, which can reduce the effectiveness of decisions. Meaning that workers make choices based on what is best for their area of responsibility, rather than the business in its entirety. This means you are probably missing valuable improvement opportunities.

Not only does AVEVA Insight collect and consolidate information, but it helps empower workers to be more connected and collaborative. The intuitive interface provides easy access to a single digital thread across the organization that can be accessed via desktop, tablet, mobile and even wearables. And with 24/7 access to trusted information and customized alerts, users are equipped to make better, faster decisions.

In the USA, office furniture provider Leggett & Platt has transitioned to AVEVA Insight’s cloud-based solutions to unify data across their manufacturing operations, helping them realize significant gains in efficiency and decision making. Their automation manager commented, “AVEVA Insight is being rapidly adopted across our organization. The speed at which we can implement a real-time manufacturing solution has drastically been minimized, going from weeks to only hours. This capability gives us the flexibility to provide more actionable information about our process and assets to decision-makers in our business. Our management is very excited, and they can see AVEVA Insight being a good fit for our future automation needs.”

3. Improving asset reliability. Whether the objective is business continuity or operational excellence, you need to focus on your assets so that you can minimize downtime and maintain production. Without the ability to understand normal operating behavior you cannot identify and address problems early. This means you run the risk of stoppages and lost production.

Combining intelligence with the digital twin enables customers to maximize profitability and drive risk out of their operations, while reducing downtime up to 25 per cent and maintenance costs by 30 per cent. AVEVA Insight now delivers self-service anomaly detection, with no programming required, through to more comprehensive analytics for in-depth analysis of operations and maintenance processes so that customers can take advantage of prescriptive actions, AI and machine learning across the enterprise. This enables distributed teams to collaborate with a single source of truth across the operational landscape to optimize performance.

AVEVA’s EcoSystem Partner InSource Solutions helped C-Care, a premium contract manufacturer to collect downtime events and analyze performance and OEE (overall equipment effectiveness) quickly and easily. The AVEVA Insight implementation is simple, and C-Care were “able to see data within hours of them coming on site”, and transition from a manual, paper-based system to fully digital.

4. Driving operational performance. It’s often been said that you can’t improve what you can’t measure. This is certainly the case when it comes to operational performance which requires the ability to compare against both corporate and operational KPIs. The challenge for most companies is that these KPIs sit in disparate systems that are managed and monitored by different teams. This leads to disconnected improvement initiatives and the inability to effectively discover efficiency opportunities.

With AVEVA Insight, you can visualize, monitor, and act on both corporate and operational KPIs in one easy-to-use system. This means that everyone is focusing on a single set of metrics and able to make decisions that positively impact performance across the business.

Take Ballard Power Systems for instance who utilize AVEVA Insight as a closed-loop, user friendly IIoT solution that can handle data acquisition and storage fidelity across millions of tags, and monitoring and analysis of data from online and offline sources. Their VP Technology and Product Development states, “AVEVA Insight has enabled Ballard to rapidly and securely implement a cloud-based approach to monitoring our fuel cell products in operation globally. The real-time data and insights we achieve, combined with the analytic capabilities, are supporting sound decision-making for Ballard and our customers.”

In summary, AVEVA Insight provides a single solution to address four of the most common operational challenges. It delivers information when and where you need it, so you and your teams, can better manage your assets and improve performance. Plus, its quick to get started! Explore the live demo and sign up for a free 45-day trial using your own data and see how easy it is to transform your industrial operations.