Just as in most increasingly digitalized applications, many operations technology (OT) industries are emulating their information technology (IT) counterparts to achieve greater success. To help process control and analytics technologies take advantage of the these tools, Octave seeks to free users from their traditional, organizational silos, add context to their data, and convert it into useful input they can act on to complete tasks more quickly.

“This situation mirrors how the family road trip has evolved. People previously used paper maps to manually figure out mileage and destinations, and later printed out MapQuest directions, but now GPS software provides turn-by-turn directions based on real-time traffic patterns,” says Brian Nixon, senior strategy and enablement consulting leader at Octave. “The same is happening with IT-based data analytics, which have removed many former barriers, can process more information from more sources, and add context such as physical locations. Unfortunately, many process industries are still largely siloed, and have fewer opportunities to turn their data into actionable intelligence.”

After spinning off from Hexagon AB earlier this year, Octave has been consolidating and renaming many of its software products. Several are organized under its Tempo software umbrella, including Control System Effectiveness (formerly PAS PlantState Integrity), Operations Management (formerly j5), and Operating Procedures (formerly Accelerator KMS). Nixon reports that Tempo’s solutions can perform many traditional data gathering and process control jobs. For example, early control applications used to rely on pneumatic devices, strip chart recorders, light boxes and clipboards; then came limited control loop applications using basic PCs where software fit on a floppy disk, modern control systems are much more expansive with more loops, task automation, instruments and integrations with external applications.

“Each new generation of process controls and analytics expands their available data, but the ability to use it hasn’t kept up,” explains Nixon. “Users must be able to access and consume all of their data, add context between sets, and harmonize them to add value.”

Neil Singh, senior manager for product management and operations optimization products at Octave, adds that, “Users previously had to invest in acquiring more data. Now, they have much of the information they need to seek better business outcomes, such as efficiency, productivity and profit. However, to reach those goals, there’s still a need for greater process awareness, understanding and action. This is where Octave’s portfolio, such as Control System Effectiveness, can perform core analytics, and handoff the results to Tempo Operations Management.”

For instance, U.K-based, specialty-chemicals manufacturer Infineum recently implemented Tempo Operations Management on a central, web-enabled, U.S.-based server accessible by any authorized user connected to its wide area network (WAN) from any location (Figure 1). This enabled Infineum to standardize its shift, handover processes and daily production reports, which previously varied from site to site. They were also time-consuming because they were manually prepared, which also made them difficult to search, filter and retrieve. Infineum also needed standardized software that could maintain consistency, but still accommodate different locations, crew roles, data sources, regulations, and multiple languages such as English, Mandarin, Italian, German and Portuguese.

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More specifically, Infineum adopted Tempo’s Operations Logbook, Shift Handover, Work Instructions and Operations Management dashboards, reports and views. Tempo Operations Management also connects with external historians and databases, which make real-time data available to it from Infineum’s other systems. These sources include:

• Each plant’s historians provide process data about shift handovers, daily production, meetings or process log reports.
• Custom databases at the plants identify present batch, statuses and violations of process variable in equipment, operating windows.
• Asset lists, present work orders, and notifications available from the computerized maintenance management system (CMMS).
• Tempo Operator Rounds and Routine Duties software uses a mobile interface to provide field data such as exception readings.
• Laboratory information management system (LMS) delivers relevant lab results.

Infineum reports that standardizing its data sources, and gaining closer-to-immediate results and documentation saves time, improves accuracy, aids communications by making information available to all authorized team members, and contributes to improve decision-making. In addition, formalizing and harmonizing Infineum’s handover procedure with Tempo Shift Handover software improves consistency and safety, and helps meet its regulatory and compliance obligations.

“Process data and analytics involves a lot of who, what, where, when and why in context, which not coincidentally is what time-series data (TSD) is all about. Octave provides this context including timestamps,” says Singh. “This unlocks insights for manufacturing teams. It lets users interact with their processes. The days are gone of veteran operators and engineers, walking their facilities and intuitively knowing the status of their processes and how to act. Today’s process, industry companies need resilience planning because rookie operators and engineers don’t have as much tribal know-how, and probably won’t stick around long enough to acquire it anyway. This is why it’s useful to apply Octave and Tempo to standardize and converge data because about 60% of users are still relying on Excel, and their mission now is to gradually achieve greater maturity and higher-fidelity data, decisions and value.”