Operational excellence: Optimize production every day

Unlike discrete manufacturing, the key to stable and efficient production in process industry lies in daily operation and maintenance after the factory is built. Once the unplanned shutdown often produces huge losses, on the contrary, if the continuous optimization of the production process and continuous improvement, even if the efficiency of 1% or save 1% of energy consumption will have huge economic benefits, therefore, from excellent operation to excellent operation has been the goal of process industrial enterprises. At this technology Innovation conference, Honeywell unveiled a number of new products and technologies to help process companies achieve operational excellence.

To achieve operational excellence, Zhao said, the first step is to improve the level of control to reduce volatility and real-time optimization. In this regard, Honeywell has always had the industry leading Profit Suite advanced control and real-time optimization platform. Today, Honeywell is introducing PERFORMANCE+, which introduces process digital twin technology and production intelligence technology. Using the dynamic simulation function of digital twin, PERFORMANCE+ plays a role similar to software measurement, which can collect on-site data in real time, and compare it with the best historical data, find the deviation and provide optimization suggestions. The Production Intelligence technology uses Microsoft-based generative AI technology to help process engineers analyze data and find the reasons why operating performance is not at its best. In the past, such work relied only on decades of experience accumulated by experts, but now the process engineer is equipped with an expert assistant, providing guided fault diagnosis, limit and deviation optimization, performance deviation prediction and intelligent search and analysis functions, personnel efficiency can be increased by about 50%, and the overall line crossing operation is reduced by 20%.

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The second important step in achieving operational excellence is predictive maintenance of production equipment. At the conference, Honeywell unveiled the first VERSATILIS sensor dedicated to predictive maintenance of equipment. VERSATILIS sensor is small in size and easy to install. It can monitor more than 20 variables, such as vibration, temperature, humidity, sound and magnetic flux, etc. After the VERSATILIS sensor is installed on the device, the staff can view the information in real time through Bluetooth in the mobile APP. Of course, sensor data can also be wirelessly uploaded to Honeywell’s APM predictive maintenance platform, which presets customized model templates such as performance models, health models, and machine learning models for proactive and predictive maintenance of devices.

In Zhao Jiang’s view, the achievement of operational excellence is also inseparable from the expert operation and maintenance personnel. On the one hand, Honeywell has introduced a handheld terminal for electronic job instruction and a portable security monitoring terminal that can randomly call for emergency help and locate it in real time. The handheld terminal displays the operation prompts of inspection engineers and related dangers or warnings. These terminals are connected to a single platform, and each step is recorded and displayed in real time, which greatly prevents misoperations. On the other hand, Honeywell also introduced EXPERION, a generative AI human-machine interface, a ChatGPt-like deep learning system that can interact with natural language to generate some reports and even generate some estimated trends, which can be displayed on the screen for operators to refer to and predict.

In addition, Honeywell’s previously announced Manufacturing Excellence Platform (MXP) has been further upgraded to cover the life sciences and fine chemicals sectors, with the advantages of its flexible modular platform to help enterprises accelerate digital transformation and improve efficiency, quality and compliance.

“Digital operation intelligence is one of our priorities, we put forward the goal of operational excellence, is to help customers operate the plant every day in the best state, each operator is an expert operating personnel.” Zhao Jiang said that although this seems to be a very simple goal, the implementation is very complex, and it needs to constantly introduce innovative digital intelligence technology to truly achieve from good to excellent.