The process industry is facing pressure from all sides of the industrial and legislative spectrum. Industrial customers large and small are demanding adaptable contemporary solutions that deliver new levels of performance, integration, throughput and flexibility. Local and international legislative bodies are then compounding these demands with the need for full traceability, safety and accountability. Far from being a grim and rather onerous scenario, the majority of the leading technology providers and their distributors have, in fact, got it all in hand and are well placed to deliver solutions.
Technological advances more often than not deliver a double-edged sword. As well as giving OEMs the ability to deliver the latest and greatest in terms of performance and capability, they also give end users, external bodies and other entities in the value chain a shopping list of features they want to see. It is these two channels – both the pushing and pulling of technology – that are driving the majority of developments in research and development labs at the major suppliers of process automation and control solutions.
Looking at the industry’s demands, the majority of requests from the machine builders are those filtered down from their customers. They want flexible, open and agile solutions that can be adapted to suit a broad range of manufacturing demands and infrastructures. Probably the biggest breakthrough in recent years is the ability to apply the economies of mass production in batch-production applications.
Economies of scale is a pervading economic metric which still stands true in a great many industries, including the process industry. In its basic guise, large CAPEX investments are offset over a period of time through the sheer volume of (often identical) products manufactured. The problem is that most manufacturing operations these days are demanding smaller, more flexible machines that are capable of producing a larger variety of different products, with minimal time, engineering and changeover costs. Modern advances in hardware and control solutions have certainly addressed many of these issues and with the advent of greater access to data and its subsequent use, these advances will continue to gather pace.
Familiarity is another demand from many of the leading end users. One only has to look at the PackML standard, established by leading blue-chip home and healthcare end users. The standard was developed to define a common approach, or machine language, for automated machines – and not just those from one supplier, we’re talking all leading suppliers here. The primary goal is to encourage a common look and feel across all plant floors, no matter where they are in the world. Adopted as part of the ISA88 industry standard, PackML has since been implemented by users and machine builders on a wide variety of control platforms and is a great example of industry demands being solved by automation providers and then implemented by machine builders.
Data, mentioned earlier, is a primary driver in many of the technological “pushes and pulls”. The advent of more open control architectures has led to standard Ethernet and its standards-based derivatives becoming pervasive on the shop floor; with many of the older, less open protocols being restricted to discrete operations, often the niche applications for which they were first developed. By using open protocols the flow of manufacturing and process data has turned from a trickle of need-to-know bespoke parameters into a flood of ones and zeros that can be viewed by anyone with the right access privileges.
This massive increase in data infrastructures and data handling capabilities means that process recipes and machine-operating parameters can be changed at the flick of a switch, either by lineside operators or by enterprise-level ERP systems. What is more, thanks to much easier access and the subsequent presentation of historical data, the same staff or ERP system can subsequently fine tune production runs to maximise yield, quality and profitability.
Access to far greater volumes of time-sensitive and pertinent data being generate at the machine/component level is also allowing the process industry to cater for two of the biggest international legislative drivers – especially in terms of products manufactured for consumption or healthcare – traceability and tracking. As well as giving companies the ability to track ingredients and raw materials from goods in to the supermarket shelf, for quality and recall reasons, the same technology is giving drug manufacturers very powerful tools in the constant fight against counterfeiting, which is a huge problem internationally. By creating unique batch and company specific coding regimens generated at process machine level, resellers and purchasers alike can have a lot more confidence that the drugs and pharmaceuticals they are purchasing are from legitimate sources and that the batch codes and ingredients can be traced back to precise timeslots and specific machines, operators and raw materials. This approach is still under discussion and is seeing a variety of approaches from different economic, geographic and legislative bodies, but the good news is that the hardware is available from the process automation providers as is the all-important communication stream at all levels of the production process.
The process industry also faces a unique set of safety challenges – even milk powder can be explosive in the right conditions – so process automation providers are now making safety solutions and their subsequent interoperability with the wider process control solution part of a holistic solution as opposed to a bolted on afterthought. Regular headlines have shown the devastating effects that explosions can have, with the recent chemical plant in China being an unpleasant, but graphic example of what can go wrong if safety solutions are not up to scratch. Like many incidents like this, subsequent investigations may show that more robust procedures coupled to up-to-date technology can play a huge part in preventing catastrophes.
Machine builders have access to an enormous range of safety solutions, from small discrete safety-relay based solutions to fully integrated safety suites; and from a product perspective there are a multitude of ATEX-compliant products and hardware that make these safety systems even more robust.
Sustainability is another major ethic that many process companies are publically broadcasting. ISO 14000 has just about as much impact these days as ISO 9001, with sustainability targets getting ever tougher, either through self-set targets, or indeed, through national and international legislation. Process automation may not sound like the most obvious solution – and it certainly doesn’t work in isolation – but it can offer incredible savings in time, energy and raw materials and, by removing what is often the weak link in many process (the operator) the risks of leaks, unwarranted venting and spills can be significantly reduced – the result being increased environmental credentials, even if these aren’t immediately apparent due to nothing happening being a positive result.
As industries go, the process industry certainly faces a much broader set of challenges than many others due to the variety of procedures and raw materials being deployed and the huge breadth of end user and customer types. Legislation abounds from end users, local, national and international bodies and the end users also want familiarity with what they are using. For these reasons the suppliers of process automation solutions have to stay one step ahead and cater for future legislation while also helping their customers to deal with existing market demands. Distributors such as RS Components also play a vital role in educating the market and supplying the hardware that will allow users to address this vast variety of needs.
This article was written for Publitek on behalf of RS Components.