Making automation pay enterprise-wide

Accounting personnel may also not understand automation benefits and often don’t trust real-time data. Good real-time data will likely be more accurate than counting the number of trucks, so again, there may be some work to be done. Also marketing personnel may say that they want higher quality but are unwilling to commit to charging a higher price for it. So if there is no expected value from the higher quality then there will be no new benefits.

Fourth, Partner
The surprising thing is not that partnering is so seldom done well, but rather that it is ever done at all. Partnering is very beneficial, but it is hard; and benefits usually take some time to appear–more time than management may be willing to wait. If partnering is not working for you, you need to ask if you have done what you should to support the partnering effort.

Have there been discussions between the end-user company automation management and the supplier management to set objectives and expectations for the partnership? Have each of the partners assigned a person to manage the partnership and given them appropriate amount of time to do so? Do all of the participants in each company understand the objectives of the partnership and who in their company to go to for assistance with the partnership? Are surveys done on a regular basis to determine levels of satisfaction? Are the partnership managers really resolving issues, and are there regular meetings between the partnership managers?

Fifth, Develop Professional Staff
Creating a viable cost-efficient automation system design is challenging. Not only is the scope of automation technology available extremely broad, but the technology is changing and advancing rapidly as well. In addition to the technical nature and ever-changing scope of the control technology landscape, automation professionals must often take responsibility for communicating with individual stakeholders and for the overall performance of the project.

Few automation professionals (engineers) learn these technical skills in school–in fact, professionals in automation have a more varied educational backgrounds than most any other technical discipline. Furthermore, because the automation and process control profession attracts people who are interested in becoming immersed in its complex technology, even fewer are prepared for the communication and leadership roles they must take on to manage automation projects successfully.

In the past, most automation personnel learned their trade by working on the job in a junior role for some number of years and continuing their education by taking courses or training sponsored by the company and from technical societies, vendors and other providers. Today, as in most industries, cost pressures on both end users and suppliers have virtually eliminated on-the-job training; and far fewer courses are taken by individuals, except those specifically required to know how to operate or program a specific system.

Benefits Even Harder
Delivering new benefits from an automation standpoint is even more challenging since it requires knowledge of identifying and estimating them and developing justifications—really taking charge of the project—and a possessing a broad enough knowledge of automation to conceptualize the best technology to use.

Certification is a way to help deal with these issues. While the basic role of certification is to ensure that people practicing the topic are qualified to do so, a major benefit is to motivate applicants to learn more.

Certifications are everywhere today. Even the most obscure specialty in the medical field–for doctors, nurses and technicians—seems to have a certification program, and many of these are required by law or required by the hospital or by the insurance company to operate that equipment or to practice in that specialty.

Some companies require that project managers hold the Project Manager Professional (PMP) certification. Worldwide, more than 80,000 project managers are PMPs. Outside the engineering and medical areas there are even more certifications. In contrast, designing mission-critical automation systems and designing safety systems to protect the environment and personnel rarely requires any certification or even any specific education. Many states have the Professional Engineer (P.E.) registration but in automation that is required only for some types of electrical design. To date, only a small fraction of automation professionals in the U.S. have a P.E. Some other countries have similar certifications but in most countries even fewer are certified than in the U.S. Regardless, a shift to use the P.E. as the certification for all types of automation work is not always practical. There are serious geographical and technical scope limitations with the P.E. relative to automation; and, because of the engineering educational requirement for the P.E., only a fraction of the people working as automation professionals today could qualify).

A new certification developed by ISA, Certified Automation Professional (CAP), has the right scope to deal with these needs. It focuses not just on the broad technology of automation but also on the identification of benefits, justification and execution of the project.

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The best of best automation practices

1.  Replace control systems when they are “obsolete” (The term “obsolete” should really be retired because as long as a system will do the task it was installed to do it is not really obsolete; and systems can be maintained almost indefinitely at some cost to do that task. The real best practice is to replace control systems when there is a defined benefit to do so.) 

2.  Install smart sensors and valves in critical areas.

3.  Fix the control valves (Studies of control valve performance often indicate an average of more than one problem per control valve). 

4.  Tune your controllers and get them operating at the highest design level.

5.  Put advanced process controls such as model reference controls on unit processes that are difficult to control. (The book, Advanced Control Unleashed, is loaded with good things to do with advanced process control.) 

6.  Install an asset management system. 

7.  Install a scheduling system to optimize product runs and make changeovers faster. 

8.  Make data more widely and easily accessible. Install and integrate plant data with MES systems.

9.  Integrate plant inventory and production information with business systems. For supply chain  scheduling, make to order vs. make to stock. 

10. Install a work-in-progress inventory system using live data to give accurate real time cost accounting information. Improve ability to determine delivery dates. Install functionality to do equipment performance monitoring. 

11. Standardize hardware, software, and communications across the company.

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Vernon L. Trevathan, P. E., PMP, has worked in process automation and project management for more than 40 years, mostly with Monsanto Co. in engineering and manufacturing management positions. He is an ISA Fellow. He currently consults and teaches in project management for automation; and he may be reached at trevathan@ieee.org.