March 2007 Archives

In an earlier post about a Mynah Simulation Consultant joining the automation blogging community, I sent a note to Jason Covington who manages their forums and blog expressing my wish that these were RSS-enabled. This meant that I could receive updates as posts were made, instead of having to go visit the site and check for new things.

Today, I received a comment back from Jason sharing the good news that their site is now RSS-enabled. I'll share Jason's comment here in its entirety:

We have added an RSS Feed for all of our MYNAH Forums content:
http://www.mynah.com/forum/RSS_topic_feed.asp

This link allows you to pick a Reader if you don't already have one.

If you already have an RSS News Reader installed on your computer, use:

feed://www.mynah.com/forum/RSS_topic_feed.asp

The MYNAH Forums allow you to pick specific levels for your RSS Feed. For example, if you are only interested in getting a feed of the latest posts from the MiMiC Users' Forum, you can click the RSS Feed button in that specific Forum and receive MiMiC-specific feeds only:

http://www.mynah.com/forum/RSS_topic_feed.asp?FID=7

Enjoy!

Jason Covington
MYNAH

Now I can quickly scan the conversations going on around simulation, OPC, and other connectivity solutions and see where experts from Emerson can join in.

If you've never used RSS to see the value of having information come to you instead of you going to find it, I recommend spending a few minutes with one of the browser-based RSS readers like Google Reader or Bloglines. There's no software to install with these.

And while you're there, add the Emerson Process Experts RSS feed and perhaps other automation and process industry ones from my blogroll so you can share your expertise.

It is great to see the area of Emerson Process Management website on variability management services updated. I received a heads up from Bill Tjoa who manages the marketing efforts for this and other consulting programs.

On the right-side navigation, the site links to the variability management posts we've done here at Emerson Process Experts. With the addition of these posts, the pages provide a nice blend of services, stories and whitepapers of the people who perform these services, seminar topics/dates/locations, and tools like the Emerson Entech toolkit.

Over the past couple of years, more and more resources have become available to help you better understand ways to deal with process variability.

Over at the ModelingAndControl.com blog, Greg and Terry share the ins and outs in controlling a process given deadtimes, disturbances, non-linearities, and all the other challenges automation engineers face. You can learn from their practical experiences and apply it in your manufacturing processes.

In the educational services area, I've been pointing to John Egnew's Loop Tips on practical tips to improve loop performance.

Over here, we've shown a screencast how newer technologies automatically learn the dynamics of your process.

And with the variability management consultants, you have experienced folks who can help apply their expertise to help you reduce variability. Better controlling this variability can yield operational improvements and quantified business results like those chronicled in an earlier post:

The columns achieved 100% of design production 5 days after James first arrived and nearly another 20% after a total of 7 days.

We'll continue to look for opportunities to share their stories here.

As reported in my DeltaV News RSS feed, Emerson's Michalle Adkins and Dawn Marruchella have written a great piece in the AIChE's Chemical Engineering Progress Magazine entitled, Ask the Experts - Avoiding the Pains of Systems Integration.

In it, they recognize some of the issues process manufacturers have faced with manufacturing execution system (MES) integration projects and they share their expertise about how to reduce concerns about integrating existing batch process and achievable business benefits.

Their initial guidance is to analyze the integration needs and current business processes and develop a solution weighing the costs and risks against the sought benefits.

Functionality can overlap in both the MES and control system. If your control system has well integrated batch capabilities, Michalle and Dawn recommend using it to manage recipe execution and historical data collection around the batch. This reduces the complexity of the integration between the MES and control system and helps simplify the requirements for the MES. Then ease of MES and DCS integration and specifically capturing the information required for the electronic batch record would be the focus of the integration efforts.

Also, as mentioned in prior posts, they recommend that the solution have:

Support for web services, a service-oriented architecture, and the use of XML schemas, such as ISA-S95's business-to-manufacturing markup language (B2MML)...

Their final recommendation is to review successful implementations to understand not only the software and integration, but also the experience of the project team who implemented the solution.

The benefits for these efforts must accomplish the highly sought after business objectives. If these objectives are to reduce the cycle time for product release, you can incorporate much of the current after-the-fact documentation into the running batch process. Examples cited include:

• Manual setup, cleaning, and maintenance activities
• Review and approval processes for master and batch documents
• On-line data validity checks, electronic signatures, and completed calculations
• Exception-based reporting tailored for intended audience

By executing these tasks during the production of the batch, process manufacturers can increase their right-first-time metrics and shorten the post-batch approval cycle time. The article cites other achievable benefits based on the identified business objectives such as reducing deviations, significantly decreasing manual data entries, and eliminating paper log books.

Automation World magazine recently had a great primer article on electronic device description language (EDDL) entitled, Device Descriptors Prove Merit. Application manager, Jim Gray, in Emerson's Rosemount Analytical Liquid division best summarized this important standard by saying:

...the most important thing about electronic device description language (EDDL) is that it makes managing process instrumentation easier.

If you're unfamiliar with EDDL, here's a short summary from an earlier news release:

An international standard -- IEC 1804-3 -- Electronic Device Description Language (EDDL) is a universal interface to diagnostic, real-time and asset management information contained in what is currently a growing installed base of more than 20 million field instruments from a host of manufacturers. With EDDL, a user can calibrate instruments, diagnose problems, provide data for user interface displays, identify process alarms, and obtain information needed for high-level software, such as MES, UI/SCADA, plant historians, asset management and ERP.

Virtually every vendor of process control systems worldwide supports the standard language and the information it describes is available in any HART Communication, Foundation fieldbus, or Profibus based instrument made since 1990.

ModelingAndControl.com's Terry Blevins is heading up the ISA-SP104 standards committee to continue to advance the EDDL standard.

I asked Jim for some examples of how this standard makes thing easier for automation engineers, operators, and maintenance technicians. As Jim sees it, the biggest advantage is that the presentation of the diagnostic and other information in smart field devices is separated from the actual data. This allows software applications to present information from a host of different device suppliers in a common, intuitive way.

The best analogy I can think of is RSS where the data resides in XML files on various websites across the internet. RSS Readers like Google Reader, Internet Explorer 7, Firefox, etc. handle the presentation of this information each in their own unique way. As a consumer of RSS feeds, it's much faster and easier to read the feeds in a common location in a common way with one of these RSS readers.

In the case of Rosemount liquid analytical smart devices like pH, conductivity, and dissolved oxygen transmitters provide EDDL files with their diagnostic, configuration and operating data and make this data available to software packages like AMS Device Manager to present the information. Like the RSS readers, AMS Device Manager presents this data in a standard way including device status, trends, gauges, and advanced device help to name a few. This is true for any suppliers' devices which support the EDDL standard. Also, other application software which supports the EDDL standard can present this information from Emerson devices which support this standard.

Jim sums it up rather nicely in the article:

The whole idea is to let the user know what is going on with the device and any actions that need to be taken, quickly and clearly, and to make configuration commissioning easier.

The growing conversation on the Food and Drug Administration's Process Analytical Technology (PAT) initiative continues. My persistent RSS search on PAT pointed to another great article, this time in Pharmaceutical Technology magazine. The article, The Five Steps to Starting PAT by Jacob Cook, discusses simplifying the process of getting started with a PAT initiative.

The five steps discussed were:

• Pick simple.
• Understand all the details and nuances.
• Evaluate the instrumentation you already have, and the information you can easily collect.
• Understand the appropriate intervals for collecting that data.
• Evaluate the tools available for reading and synchronizing the data.

Just last week we discussed the benefits of applying a structured approach to a PAT initiative to improve opportunities for initial success.

I passed this article by Christie Deitz, whom you may recall from earlier posts on PAT and ISA-88 (S88) projects. Like most initiatives, Christie believes having good data (step 3) is very important. The Life Sciences industry project teams use DeltaV Batch which integrates in a single location the data required for this analysis. This data includes: alarming, continuous and batch history, operator actions and other events. Having this information organized together around batches and campaigns can help identify PAT opportunities.

Where manufacturing execution systems (MES) like Compliance Suite are also used, exception-based reporting can also help with this process of analyzing the data. We discussed using XSL style sheets to do these reports in an earlier post. An example of this exception-based reporting is showing the batch reviewers only the alarm data that occurred during any particular batch run or campaign.

Christie also points out that where manufacturers have already implemented PAT analyzers, they can make decisions in electronic work instructions (EWIs) based on the analyzers' real-time data values to help verify its correct operation. For example, if a PAT analyzer is not reading the expected value based on other operating data, the work instruction can be to have the operator take a manual sample against which to compare the analyzer data value.

Whether you "pick simply" as a starting point or apply a structured methodology to assess the best opportunities to begin, analyzing your existing data is extremely important. The analysis process is less manually intensive when this data is either centralized or logically organized together in some manner to help better identify these opportunities.

Today is the last day to share your thoughts with Intech Magazine on their fieldbus survey. From their email to me:

Fieldbus has been in the industry for just over a decade and is an important part of the automation solution package. InTech magazine is conducting a survey to determine what readers see as challenges and opportunities for the protocol. InTech's editors will report on the answers in the InTech Market Study on buses in our April issue.

If you have experience with one of the fieldbuses, please take a moment and add your thoughts to this survey.

This week's DeltaV News RSS Feed announced the DeltaV InSight integrated control performance software package. The news release described the method for improved control performance:

DeltaV InSight automatically learns users' processes with embedded learning algorithms running at the controller level and develops process models based on day-to-day operations. These models allow users to identify operational benchmarks, diagnose problems and calculate optimum loop tuning across the entire control system.

Upon process changes like an operator setpoint change or a sequential logic-induced change which causes the process to move to a new operating state, the software learns the dynamics of the process from this change and provides recommendations on new tuning calculations. I discussed his capability in detail in an earlier post with DeltaV Advanced Control product manager, John Caldwell.

Over the years, I've become a fan of blogger and new Microsoft employee, Jon Udell and his use of screencasts. These short screen-captured videos really save thousands of words and help quickly demonstrate something he is discussing.

I spoke with John Caldwell and he agreed to give it a go and do a quick screencast of DeltaV InSight.

The screencast begins with a one-slide overview of DeltaV InSight followed by a demonstration of the software. I hope it conveys in its 3:22 second run-time a sample of this process of recognizing, learning, recommending, and implementing the change. There is also a product data sheet and whitepaper now available presenting additional capabilities.

John adds that the development team worked closely with several process manufacturers in developing and testing this functionality. We developed a video from one of the manufacturers, Lubrizol, last fall to document some of the initial results they saw.

In a recent Pharmaceutical Processing magazine article, PAT Searches for its Identity, author Bikash Chatterjee discusses the seemingly slow pace of Process Analytical Technology (PAT) implementations. The article states:

What the FDA has provided is a bold chance for our industry--long mired in historical inefficiencies and product failure--to reinvent and improve existing processes for superior cycle-time, consistency and yield.

Given the change in regulatory climate the article questions why we haven't seen a glut of PAT applications to help achieve better operational results. The author points to challenges in the details to implement. Also the traditional emphasis on product and compliance orientation needs to shift as the article states:

...toward an understanding of critical processes to achieve the significant PAT benefits that have worked so well in other sectors.

Given the complexity of this undertaking the author suggests going forward with an approach like Six Sigma as an operational excellence project management framework.

I caught up with Michalle Adkins, a consultant in Emerson's Life Sciences Industry Center, whom you may recall from an earlier post on five strategies for mitigating project risk. She agrees with the author that a PAT initiative should be managed as part of an overall Operational Excellence program. This is because more structure and process can be provided to the initiative.

Michalle believes that by using the Six Sigma methodology, the right tools can be applied at the right time for evaluating, managing, and implementing PAT projects. The Six Sigma structure of define, measure, analyze, improve, control provides the structure for managing the PAT initiative.

It's interesting to note that some of the same tools in the Six Sigma toolbox are already inherently part of PAT such as design of experiments (DOE), statistical process analysis, and methods development. These are all very much related in terms of the types of statistical tools that are used.

Given that the PAT guidelines are still relatively new, pharmaceutical and biotech manufacturers are recognizing that the proven Six Sigma tools along with the analytical tools already used for methods development can help organize the PAT process and move these initiatives forward. It will be interesting to see how these PAT implementations begin to accelerate in the coming years as structured methodologies are applied.

In a recent Control magazine article, First the application, then the product, Editor in Chief Walt Boyes wrote about the importance of thinking about the application before selecting a level measurement technology. He wrote:

Before you do anything else, you have to have the application parameters. Most of us get so practiced with instrumentation design that we seem to start with the last ISA S20 instrument specification form we worked with and just plug it in. But the S20 forms were not designed to be application selection forms. You start with the sensor or transmitter. That's backwards.

Walt shows a level measurement continuum chart from very easy applications to nearly impossible ones and the types of measurement technologies which may be suitable.

I passed this article by Sarah Parker, an application manager in Emerson's Rosemount measurement division, for her thoughts. She agrees wholeheartedly that level measurement can be more complicated than it appears. For anything beyond the "very easy" as Walt puts it, there is no simple answer to the question, "What level technology should I use on my XYZ level application."

Sarah stressed that there are 3 parameters you must consider together: the technology, the installation, and the application conditions.

On the level measurement technology it's important to understand its capabilities. Questions you should answer include:

• What are its pressure and temperature limits?
• What is its range capability?
• What is its primary mode of level detection?
• Is it using mass, capacitance, or a distance measurement to make determine level?
• What are the restrictions on its use?
• What conditions will impact its performance?

On the specific installation:

• What connections are available on the tank?
• What size and style are they?
• Where are they located in reference to the material you want to measure and any internal structures?
• How big is the vessel/structure?
• Are there any valves?

And on the application conditions:

• What is the expected pressure and temperature ranges?
• What are the properties of the material being measured--liquid or solid, corrosive, viscous, sticky, or crystallizing?
• Do any of its properties such as density, dielectric, or conductivity change?
• Is there agitation?
• Is there foam?
• Is the material vaporous?
• Is there steam?

Sarah summed it up well that ideally you want to find a technology that is able to handle all the application conditions, fits on the existing connections on the vessel and fits within your budget. If you have some thoughts on this, join the conversation and add a comment.