Operations Management
/“Operations Management” is a component of the business enterprise system software package and is used by plant operators to create operation logs, work instructions, and shift handover reports. This solution product helps to ensure safe, reliable, and efficient plant operations.
Yokogawa’s Operations Management is a comprehensive suite of solutions based on Yokogawa’s digital transformation technologies and domain knowledge.
Operations Management helps customers achieve profit-driven operation over the entire life cycle of the plant.
Figure 1 – Operations Management as a solution
As shown in Figure 1, there are several boxes in the profit-driven operation suite. Let’s look at them one by one:
Command Center Design and Production Center Design boxes: these are the design and construction services that consider ergonomics, production workflow, and agile and collaborative operation.
Integrated KPI Design: this allows customers to define the holistic KPIs covering all organizational functions and all management objectives for profit-driven operation in the future. It also provides a KPI Balanced Scorecard to monitor the trade-offs.
Real-time KPI Dashboard and Report: this provides customers with real-time KPI dashboards using live DCS data so that plant operators and engineers can solve KPI-related issues immediately before they identified as management-level KPIs.
KPI & Data Analytics: this provides customers with new findings from plant big data and KPI data generated using AI machine learning or multivariable analysis.
Online Prediction: this provides an online prediction system based on an analytic algorithm.
Decision Support: this guides plant personnel, such as operators or engineers, through a decision-making process using AI technologies to ensure correct decisions.
Profit Improvement Program: this is a consulting suite based on the 4DS method (Define, Discover, Develop, Deliver, and Sustain) that ensures that customers achieve sustainable benefits through problem solving.
Incident Management: this ensures complete visibility when investigating incidents and helps track actions to closure along with the accountability of the respective stakeholders whose actions are required.
Management of Change (MOC): this is a digitized MOC that significantly helps businesses to enforce best practices in managing plant-wide changes more effectively with greater visibility, consistency, accountability, and controllability.
Permit to Work: this offers significant functional advantages over a paper system. It allows easier management of permits by a group of staff members, such as plant operators and maintenance teams. Plant managers have complete visibility and an “at a glance” option that provides graphical views of the status of all permits, and they can also identify permits that are of interest to them.
Logbook: this saves time over logging data in a traditional logbook and maintains data integrity. In addition, searching the data will take less time, making it easier to utilize the data.
Shift Handover: this enables customers to save millions of hours by automating handover processes.
Work Instruction: this can be used by managers to assign, execute, and monitor work instruction tasks on a common platform.
Performance Alarm Management and Process Alarm Management: these help customers to follow the ISA 18.2 standards to effectively use performance and process alarms.
Advanced Operation Graphic or 4K Ergonomics Dashboard: this displays plant safety and productivity improvements using mental model-based PCS graphics. Moreover, by using the process simulator, the internal conditions of a process unit, such as material balance or heat balance, can be clearly visualized.
Enterprise Team Effectiveness: This is a consulting service that helps customers improve the effectiveness of their production team.
3D Virtual Training or Board & Field Operation Training: this is a training solution that uses 3D virtual plant and VR-AR technologies with a dynamic process simulator. This allows operators to learn plant operations anytime, anywhere through virtual reality.
Figure 2 – Human reliability program
Yokogawa’s Human reliability program improves human reliability by reducing human errors through the digitalization and automation of SOPs, improving human decisions by providing actionable insights.
The alarm rationalization workflow enabled by Operations Management:
1. Automatic identification of bad actor alarms and business process workflows.
2. Digitalization of operator log records, which helps to convert unstructured data into structured data.
3. Improves searchability and easy retrieval of information for further reference, which improves decision making.
4. Standardized and structured instructions improve execution efficiency and help to build operational procedures and monitor them to identify improvement areas.
5. Digitalized and automated shift handovers help to streamline shift handovers and to prevent omissions, which in turn helps to improve human reliability.
Figure 3 – Operations Management Suite
For plants that are operated in shifts, this solution effectively manages the various types of information that are used and exchanged by shift groups, such as information related to HSE (Health Safety and Environment) for near-miss incidents, MoC (Management of Change), PtW (Permit to Work), Operation Logs, and Work Instructions, making them available and reusable during the shift handover without omitting any information by mistake.
The OM system interfaces with other systems, such as plant historians, CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management System), and LIMS (Laboratory Information Maintenance Management System), to compile critical information required for handovers.
Figure 4 – Operations Management Logbook
Logbook is designed for those who spend too much time creating logs manually and want to save time while maintaining data integrity. It helps with sharing the plant’s log information, making it accessible to various people, and contains a search option for analyses. It enables accurate and reliable shift handovers and status tracing of important logged issues.
Digitalized logbooks enable the building of an operational history and knowledgebase.
Yokogawa’s Operations Management solution provides “plant-wide operation log entries,” which is a centralized system in which all roles in the plant (field operator, panel operator, shift managers) use the same system for operation logs and activity status updates. Digitization ensures that all this information is visible and makes it easier to search and retrieve required information.
Figure 5 - OPERATIONS MANAGEMENT WORK INSTRUCTION
Digitalization makes it possible to utilize the Work Instructions and provide very detailed step-by-step procedures so that operators can perform efficiently. It standardizes plant operations and helps to preserve the operational knowledge of senior and experienced operators. Capturing such valuable knowledge helps junior operators perform operations with a similar efficiency as experienced operators.
Work Instructions is a simple yet powerful tool, enabling operators to assign, execute, and monitor work instruction tasks on a common platform.
Shift Handover helps plant managers save millions of hours by automating their handover processes. This is possible with the integrations that Yokogawa has achieved with its platform, following the idea behind the question, why do the same activity twice?
figure 6 - shift handover report
Shift Handover’s intelligent report compiler helps with accumulating and reporting key information from various sources, such as Historians, LIMS, SAP, CMMS, and Permit systems. It helps to prevent omissions caused by human fatigue and ensures complete information transfer from the out-going shift staff to the in-coming shift staff.
Communication gaps between shifts have been identified as one of the major causes of human errors. The Shift Handover module helps to ensure a safe and reliable shift handover, thus improving human reliability and safe plant operations.
These are some of the features that make the Operations Management solution from Yokogawa a valuable asset for plant operations personnel, providing complete solutions to help them effectively run their plants.
