Reinforcing the Automation Maturity Progression

Written by Melinda Corley, Product Marketing Manager, AVEVA

Organizations are striving to add information processing capabilities so they can catch up and keep up with global demand for operational data. While still a challenge requiring active management, universal hardware drivers and integrated software are helping organizations control the chaos of data in the wild. These developments provide a means for wrangling data from multiple sources and generating insights that tell meaningful stories.

Understanding your organization’s current automation maturity level helps guide an effective digital transformation plan, and you can find out where you stand by taking a complimentary Automation Maturity Assessment.

Operational Insights with Business Process Gaps

Does your organization utilize processes to measure operational efficiency, but struggle to aggregate metrics across operational sites or business units? Do you compare metrics of predictable automated processes against business goals, but find it difficult to estimate the monetary value of technical improvements? If the answer to either of these questions is “yes”, your company is likely at the ‘reinforced’ level.

Your organization is almost fully evolved in the industrial automation space, with anomaly detection and insight generation systems in place to identify weaknesses and opportunities for improvement in operational processes. These tools help minimize downtime and associated profit losses, and they help your staff stay productive and on top of operational goals. Additionally, you are well-informed on the state of your equipment and likely have remote monitoring and alerting capabilities in place, providing peace of mind across the entire facility.
The company is highly collaborative and evaluates performance in real-time, enabling agile adjustment to changing operational landscapes and the swift elimination of unproductive activities from employee workflows. Because of standardization across the business, different units are held to consistent standards, normalized across various managers and supervisors. These standard workflows and procedures enable business rules to provide actionable information based on staff performance that can be incorporated into personnel’s everyday activities. Finally, enterprise dashboards make updating these rules routinely a simple process to address specific efficiency issues, performance problems, and new best practices.

While there is a lot going for your organization, there are more opportunities for advancement to be found by connecting your operational process data with the business systems,
such as:

• Finance
• Shift-scheduling
• Capital improvement planning
• Manufacturing execution systems (MES)
• Enterprise resource planning (ERP)

By integrating process historian data with these systems, automated tools can generate further insights on how business decisions affect operational performance, and ultimately how operational changes impact business expenses, revenues, and profit.
After integrating process and business databases, users are enlightened with exact monetary values of decisions across the enterprise. A completely centralized data repository also makes adding analytical tools simple because there is only one location to reference for all company data. This opens organizations up for the addition of manufacturing execution systems, workflow analyzers, and quality and batch control procedures without abandoning prior investments in automation and information systems.

Integration Benefits

By implementing advanced resource management integrations, your organization can benefit in the following ways:

• Configure workflow-based automated tasks, alerts, and notifications for proactive resolution.
• Protect investments with cost-effective and efficient management of end-to-end operational processes.
• Execute procedures with advanced resource management and empowerment.
• Enhance process operations.
• Improve overall equipment effectiveness (OEE).
• Increase productivity opportunities.

AVEVA is empowering users to unlock these benefits and more with AVEVA’s full Operations Portfolio.