Efficient Plant November 2017 - 11

department | news

Culture Change:
'Maintenance Doesn't Believe What Operators Are Saying.'
BUILDING IIOT MOMENTUM in the
factory is getting quite a bit of attention
these days, as manufacturers figure out how
to future-proof current investments and
choose the correct control and data platform. Advances in industrial connectivity
are dispelling fears about awful "rip-and-replace" scenarios, and more modest incremental upgrades, such as industrial servers
moving equipment data to business analytic
platforms, are being well understood.
On the other end of the spectrum, unified
control and data acquisition platforms are
providing "cleaner" solutions, albeit more
expensive. A recent two-part Tyson Foods
webinar from Rockwell Automation revealed

this type of approach and provided details
on a recent modernization effort for multiple
plants. Tyson's automation-platform solution
included a Microsoft-based SQL server, VantagePoint Software, and historians for several
of its plants. According to webinar presenter
Jonathan Riechert, senior engineer of innovation, adding visibility into the equipment was
something of a new challenge.
"We were trying to show that data is available, and they can see how their equipment is
operating," said Riechert. "As far as operators
went, the biggest [return on] investment that
we saw from their perspective was being able
to show them some of the tracking that we did
with equipment malfunctions."

As he explained, "So, in essence, we
created a maintenance report, and one of the
complaints from operators is that sometimes
maintenance doesn't always believe what
they're saying. Well, now, we can put on paper
that this is how many times the machine
specifically faulted for this issue and be able
to create buy-in in some ways." The takeaway? Disruption is a real issue in plants, but
momentum is building for technology and acceptance of new asset-management processes.
To view the entire two-part, on-demand
food-safety webinar, go to: rockwellautomation.com/en_NA/training-events/webinars/
food-safety-series.page.
- Grant Gerke, Contributing Editor

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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Efficient Plant November 2017