Whether the business goal is refining the most oil or bottling the perfect batch of beer, the most important function of automation is to help companies achieve optimum performance. But “optimum” is a moving target, and usually dependent on who is defining it. The business variables associated with manufacturing and process plants are changing faster than ever before. In the United States, changes to the power grid, volatile prices for raw materials and fierce global competition mean two weeks is too long to wait to change a process.

Luckily, technology is enabling faster business decision making based on real-time data. Pilot projects are demonstrating value quickly and are being rolled out across locations. And plant managers and controls engineers are on their way to becoming not just efficiency experts, but essential business partners.

For years industry has been focused on real-time performance and efficiency of industrial and manufacturing operations, says Peter Martin, vice president of business value generation for Plano, Texas-based Invensys Operations Management ( http://iom.invensys.com). “Controlling the efficiency of an operation directly translated into controlling the profitability of an operation: If you reduce energy consumption, you reduce energy cost. If you increase volume, you increase production value,” he says. “But all of a sudden the business variables in manufacturing have started changing from being highly stable over long periods of time to starting to demonstrate real-time variability. So now the question is how do plant managers and controls engineers deal with a real-time world [beyond the plant floor]?”

The best example of real-time business variability is energy costs, says Martin. It’s all really all changed in the last five to six years, he says, largely because of the opening of power grids throughout the world. With electricity, for example, “ten years ago most of our customers had developed contracts for their energy for as long as a year, and the price of electricity would be a constant over that contract period. Today in the United States, the price our customers are paying for electricity changes every 15 minutes. In the U.K., it’s every 20 minutes. In Spain it’s every five minutes.”

What that means, says Martin, is that “if you reduce your consumption of electricity, your electricity bills might actually go up if you’re consuming electricity during the high-cost periods and not the low-cost periods.” And there is a domino effect on other types of energy, such as natural gas, as well as on some materials, on production values like motor usage and even on carbon emissions.

What many are realizing is that the only way to control such variables is by creating a real-time information environment that enables operations to respond in the same timeframe. And since it’s true that you can’t control what you don’t measure, many real-time data pilot projects must start at the instrumentation and sensor level.

“We’re finding you can start as small as a single process unit, prove the concept works and then roll the strategy out,” says Martin. “You can do it in a very incremental, protected, cash-flow-positive way, then use the cash generated to fund the second piece.”

GlaxoSmithKline plant

At its plant in Cork, Ireland, pharmaceutical manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline ( www.gsk.com) has begun a project to better understand water usage throughout the plant. “GlaxoSmithKline is continuously looking to improve plant performance by increasing the number of parameters measured,” says Emmett Martin, site services & automation manager. “Water is a considerable overhead to the plant, so it is important that we monitor flow rates to manage consumption, and to help identify any usage trends.”

The Cork site produces a range of bulk active ingredients for use in the formulation of prescription drugs. The existing water storage facility was too small and had no measurement instrumentation in place. When two new storage tanks were installed along with a new pipework infrastructure, the company also installed ten Smart Wireless flow and pressure transmitters from Austin, Texas-based Emerson Process Management   ( www.EmersonProcess.com) .

Using six Rosemount pressure transmitters, two Rosemount flow transmitters and two Rosemount level transmitters, flow data is transmitted wirelessly every 30 seconds, and pressure and level data every 300 seconds to a Smart Wireless Gateway positioned on the control room roof. The gateway is connected using a serial connection to the Emerson DeltaV digital automation system that controls the plant utilities. From there, the flow and pressure measurements are sent to a data historian and made available to plant operators for regular monitoring and reporting.

The new data ...