Critical Situation Management in the process industries
By applying sophisticated alarms and algorithms throughout the entire supply chain, GeoSphere Systems says it can help companies reduce and manage potential manufacturing disruptions from accidents, spills, routing problems, pipeline leaks, weather, and more.
By Charles J. Miller
Contents
Knowledge is power
Increasing response velocity
The CSM solution
CSM on the plant floor
Getting back to normal
CSM emergency management
Corporate crisis management
Crit-I-cal-I-ty (krit 'i kal 'i-tee) – n. 1. The quality, state, or degree of being of the highest importance
Critical situations occur in the processing industry every day. From minor interruptions to complete disruptions of the supply chain, events are occurring on a regular basis that jeopardize the health of the employees, the environment, and indeed the corporation.
In the era of the e-commerce, where customer loyalty is as fleeting as slow loading web page, corporate growth is a function of three things:
- Application of existing technology;
- Investment in watershed technology; and
- Maximum utilization of available assets.
Ninety-eight percent of Fortune 1000 process industries manage their critical manufacturing and operational knowledge with systems ranging from three ring binders to traditional document management systems to the hope their best 25-year operations veteran doesn't quit or die. These systems have little to know interconnectivity and have very little interaction with the knowledge trapped within the minds of the operational veterans. In essence the investments made by organizations to extract critical process and operational data out of their supply chain have worked too well. Industry has focused so diligently on the extraction of information from the value chain that it has squandered its return on investment by creating "Data Prisons." Industry has created the roach motel of information systems... Data goes in, but it doesn't come out.
Attempts to approach a lights out operation have been met with virtually no success. The efforts of the automation suppliers to replace the human component with high level automation or advanced control have yielded little return due to the simple underlying principle:
"Things will go wrong."
In the current era of e-commerce the weakest link in the corporate value chain is now apparently the principles of corporate management. For reasons stemming from investment justification to perhaps plain denial, managers of the process industries want to believe. They want to believe that their $3 million investment in automation will stabilize volatile production. They want to believe that advanced process control will run their processes smoothly and efficiently. They want to believe that everything is as good as it can possibly be. There is no pain. But the truth of the matter is that there is pain. And the adage is true... "No pain no gain." If organizations continue to believe that their processes are operating as smoothly as they can or that their supply chain is invulnerable due to investments in automation than they will never achieve the level of operational excellence that is currently being demanded by their customers. As a result, his or her customers will become someone else's.
E-commerce is rapidly driving manufacturing agility and supply chain vulnerability. Age demographics and down sizing are accelerating the loss of deep process wisdom through knowledge worker attrition. This ticking time bomb means that isolated, outdated approaches to process management will not adequately address today's increasing asset utilization. Critical situations are part of everyday operations.
The term Critical Situation Management (CSM) stems from the underlying principle that critical situations occur across the organization at multiple levels every day. Upsets in the value chain that were previously considered "abnormal situations" quickly escalate to the critical level due to the volatility of the current industrial environment. Suppliers now are under such a high level of scrutiny that transgressions once considered minor can severely impact the corporate bottom line. The Internet has forever changed the way business will be conducted. Customer loyalty is only as secure as your last exchange. If a minor transgression poorly influences customers' perception, he will switch with the click of a mouse. This coupled with an environment of make to order demands is creating a powder keg on the process floor and beyond.
Studies conducted by the ASM consortium stated that incidents related to the critical disruption of process operations cost the refining industry alone over $20 billion per year.
Abnormal process operation can be just as costly due to opportunity costs. For every 100 near misses, there is 1 significant incident and the current environment is creating more near misses.
In order to address the demands of the processing industry CSM applies the most sophisticated technology known to man to address these urgent needs. Using the fastest processors on the face of the earth today, CSM delivers a measurable performance increase to the organizational bottom line by leveraging the most sophisticated knowledge management toll in existence... the human brain!
Knowledge is power(Return to contents)
No where in the depths of any organization in any country in the world will a control system be developed that is as sophisticated as the human brain. No matter what the context of the situation, the brain processes hundreds of data points simultaneously to deliver an appropriate response to an impending event. Unfortunately, the human brain is no different than even the simplest processor in existence in that it is dependent upon quality input to deliver quality output. Secondly, the memory capacity of this awesome processor is dramatically limited. Memory registers within the human brain can become quickly overfilled resulting in poor overall performance. To streamline the logic resolution process, it is imperative to filter out unnecessary information effectively reducing the signal to noise ratio. This may come in the form of removing unwanted noise such as that created by alarm overflow or in the form of increased focus by directing the attention of the human processor to the critical elements of the decision. In essence the formula becomes:
Less Noise + focused attention = Increased Response Velocity.
Increasing response velocity(Return to contents)
The ability to quickly and correctly ascertain a situation and make an educated and informed decision is the heart of the CSM solution. By increasing situational awareness surrounding a potential event and delivering context sensitive procedural information regarding the event resolution, CSM optimizes the human processor thus reconciling a situation before escalation can occur.
Simply put, by focusing the individual on the situation at hand, eliminating extraneous noise and providing a path to success through procedural recommendation, an individual can resolve a critical situation and prevent it's escalation better than any piece of software or hardware that can be purchased on the market today.
The application of the CSM philosophy is not restricted to the process floor, in fact it is the broad application of this philosophy that enables an organization to achieve the pinnacle of its success. By leveraging investments already made by the organization in such things as Distributed Control Systems, Data Historians, Document Management Systems, Order Entry Systems, Supply Chain Management Systems, etc., CSM creates the uber-processor of the process industry. Delivering critical information to those who need it when they need it empowers the individual to resolve a situation before it impacts the value chain. This may occur within the walls of the company, within the links of the value chain or beyond the bounds of the traditional manufacturing environment to include such things as product recall or public relations. The ability to apply best practices in the form of a procedural recommendation is applicable in ANY context. For the purposes of clarity, this paper will only focus on applications relevant to the process industry but the underlying philosophy is applicable to any vertical. If you can capture the information related to best practices, and deliver them to those who need them when they need them, than the rate at which an abnormal or critical situation is resolved will dramatically increase. Knowledge is power.
The CSM solution(Return to contents)
CSM is an application of the BASF motto, we don't make your employees, we make your employees better. Organizations in the process industry have invested billions of dollars in their digital infrastructure. As previously mentioned, this infrastructure incarcerates billions of points of data that, if liberated appropriately, could resolve all of the limitations upon organizational excellence. This is not a new understanding. Upon realization of the consequences of their data capture efforts, organizations immediately launched on their next series of incarcerations surrounding data mining. Companies spent additional millions of dollars mining the data from their existing prisons. The formed correlations between key process indicators and developed sophisticated algorithms to evaluate critical process data. Then they promptly took this valuable information and hid it away in another database or locked it in an equation that had no capability of determining the context of its application environment effectively restricting it's use to only pre defined events. It has no power to ask for more information, an individual does.
The ability to arrive at a decision is in principle a simple algorithm. The problem of technology lies in the inability to distinguish the context of variables unavailable. If you as the reader look back to your years of education, recall all of the formulae and corollaries you were required to learn. How many do you remember today? How long would it take you to reproduce and apply those today (the ones you don't use all the time already). How long would it take if you had them in a file on your computer desktop with instructions on how to apply them? Looking back, the futility of the memorization of all equations is clearly apparent. What you need to know is where to look to find the answers and in the midst of making a time sensitive, judgment-oriented decision, you need to know quick. You could search for the answer yourself, or you could have CSM deliver it to you.
The ability to capture and deliver critical procedural information is a key enabler of your organization. It unlocks your potential. The rise of the CSM solution is also enables by recent technical advancements. Three years ago, the CSM solution would not be possible. Only through the advent of technologies such as OPC (Ole for Process Control), XML (extensible mark-up language), and indeed the Internet itself has the CSM solution been enables. By leveraging off theses key technical advancements, CSM allows the delivery of critical information to those who need it exactly when and where they need it and in the form they need it in. It sounds ambiguous but it's really not. Companies have invested heavily in their digital infrastructure. They have determined a return on that investment based on the functional capability of the solutions they invested in. As an example, Data Historians store data. Data mining tools evaluate that data. CSM ensures that that data is used. CSM extends the return on those initial investments by ensuring the application of those investments in a manner benefiting the organization. CSM also extends the return on employees. By providing a mechanism to capture the best practices and decision making processes of the most experienced personnel, CSM allows delivery of these best practices across the organization. CSM stabilizes anomalies between shifts and between divisions by ensuring a common best practice approach to resolution of any event. The same process analogy applies to multiple levels of the organization in that best practices are not just a function of the manufacturing process. This became apparent during the "Business Process Re-engineering revolution. Work flow and work processes are essential to the success of any level of an organization. The difficulty lies in the fact that when the work process is interrupted or altered only slightly, the decision making process breaks down. Key elements of fundamental procedures are skipped or forgotten in the interest of immediate resolution of a situation.
This opportunity to improve operational excellence and reduce risk is creating new opportunities for the development of solutions surrounding Critical Situation Management or CSMTM. The ability to effectively manage or avoid critical situations across the enterprise is quickly becoming an operational imperative. Corporations have made substantial investment in distributed control systems, data historians, alarm management systems, asset management systems, document management systems, etc. The real value of CSM is that it ties ALL of these disparate silos of information together allowing organizations to associate historical and early detection data with appropriate response actions. In essence, the GeoSphere systems CSM Suite delivers critical information from un-associated silos of data to those who need it, when they need it, in an intelligent, context sensitive manner. As a result, operators, maintenance personnel, plant managers, logistics personnel, or corporate executives receive critical information in a just in time delivery environment that provides expert guidance to the resolution of a critical situation.
CSM on the plant floor(Return to contents)
At the process operations level, CSM probably has the most visible impact on the organizations profitability. This lies in the incontrovertible truth fundamentally stated as "if your not making product, your not making money." There are however, corollaries to this truth in that quality product is key to profitability and production of off spec material not only affects end product delivery but disrupts the entire value chain by forcing accommodations for reschedule of original production and rework or disposal of off-spec material.
When viewed in the light of "Shades of Normality" there are many opportunities for the application of an operational assistance tool throughout the escalation of an off normal production event. This lies in the fact that there are little to no off normal production procedures and that the application of the procedures that do exist is minimal due to inadequate means of procedure delivery. If an operator has to leaf through a three ring binder during the escalation of an off normal event, it is unlikely that he will use or for that matter even be capable of using the resources at hand due to the sensitivity of the situation. With the foundation of the ASM consortium in 1992, much research was conducted regarding the application of operational goals to address the escalation status of an off normal event. Keeping in mind that the ideal operational condition for a continuous operation was a steady state condition, the consortium evaluated conditions of escalation as it progressed from normal to abnormal to an emergency situation. The consortium theorized that by setting operational goals throughout the escalation of an event, the operators could reduce the risk of a complete shutdown of the operation by "Parking" the process in an interim state thus allowing them time to respond the situation in a more controlled manner. This theory plays on the key element of developing a situational awareness and a strategy for response based on the context of the situation. The theory broke down, however, with the inability to deliver the necessary context sensitive procedures for the corrective action outside of normal operations. It is evident that normal operating procedures are extremely detailed and easily obtainable. Likewise, procedures regarding the operational response in an emergency situation are also readily available. This is due primarily to the fact that this has been mandated by government regulation. The "gray" area in procedure availability lies in the off-normal and pre-critical arena. It is in this area that the information regarding best practices lays in the heads of the company's best operators and in the drawers of the company's best engineers. CSM has been designed to be a vehicle to promoted the collection and delivery of these "Best Practices" to the operations workspace.
Getting back to normal(Return to contents)
As has been previously mentioned, the minute a process strays from it's normal operations dead band, the company begins to jeopardize profits. The production of off spec material can have a significant impact on the overall production schedule and as a result, organizations are tremendously focused on "getting back to normal" as quickly as possible. The advent of XML and logic assessment tools has provided a significant opportunity for industry to respond to these demands. As stated earlier, CSM on the process floor takes advantage of multiple aspects of the corporate digital infrastructure. By using the process historian to access and distinguish critical process data and to conduct comparative trend analysis between real-time and historical data, the historian can be configured as an early notification system to assist operators in determining the direction in which they are headed. In a continuous world, this could be to identify operational trends that are leading to an event that might invoke the safety shutdown system and as a result, bring the process to a cold halt or in a batch world, this may be trends that indicate the batch quality is incapable of reaching specified requirements. In the batch scenario, operators would now be empowered to "abort" the batch much earlier in the process saving valuable process time for quality production. Once a notification is given, the next step in the CSM process is determination of the context of the situation. This is accomplished through automated interfaces between the Control System, the Batch/Recipe Management Systems, the Order Entry and Production Scheduling Systems, and the operator's situational awareness. Information is delivered to the logic system directly through interfaces with the various production management systems or through interaction with the operator until a firm understanding of the context of the situation is obtained. The information progression then becomes:
- Notification
- Validation/Assessment
- Confirmation
- Decision Support (Recommendation)
- Action
Upon validation of the situation context from the operator, a recommendation is provided for corrective action. This is not a book of information that the operator would need to search through before determining his response but an XML excerpted component of the procedure relative to the current state of the process. Again, procedures are being dynamically interfaced to active process data via the CSM logic engine so if the procedural step was to close a valve for example and that valve was already closed, the operator would be presented with the completed action notification and the next viable step in the procedure. Procedure delivery is centered around the three components of the abnormal span identified in Figure X above. In essence, the CSM support tool can be considered a form of on-line operator help where the operator can be asked if he needs help from an on-line assessment of the current trend or the operator can ask for help based on his awareness of the development of a potential situation. Essentially, asking for help would be akin to hitting the help button on any common software package but the initiation of the CSM system would immediately begin the process of developing the context of a situation. While much of the information tracking will be done in the background of the application, some interaction with the operator will be required to validate the operators perception of the situational context. Once resolution is achieved on the situational context, the information will be applied against the goals set forth by the organization for resolution of that particular critical event. For example, if a process failure creates a deviation from the current quality specifications and it is assured that the context of the situation is not related to a scheduled process transitional state (such a scheduled maintenance, shutdown, or product changeover), then the operator would be prompted to further define his operational goals. In this example, the goal would be centered around quality maintenance and as a result the specific procedures delivered to the operators space would recommend the necessary steps to take to prevent further quality degradation. It should be understood that in the context of this application, the measures taken to achieve stable quality of the existing process are limited. Steps get further limited as the deviation escalates to recovery of stability and finally to isolation of the particular unit from the overall process. The state of this condition is not an emergency nor has it tripped the safety systems, but it is critical to the operation in that they are no longer producing the expected quality product. The benefit of this state of operation is that the process has not tripped or been completely shut down, therefore recovery from a hot stand-by state will be enacted more quickly. Should the escalation occur more rapidly than the operators' physical ability to respond, the initiation of the help system will add significant value to the emergency recovery process in that the information necessary to respond to the emergency will already have populated the necessary information fields of the emergency response system.
CSM emergency management(Return to contents)
As mentioned in the earlier paragraphs, the CSM process solution address the early stages of process deviation. These deviations can quickly escalate to emergency situations and once at an emergency level and even more quickly accelerate to situations resulting in loss of assets up to and including loss of life. This is obviously the gravest deviation form the process norm imposed only at the failure of the process safety systems, however, as we all no, these situations do occur. One true benefits of an integrated CSM solution is that the initiation of the CSM process solution basically puts the emergency system on "Yellow Alert." The ability to quickly ascertain the dimensions of an emergency situation is invaluable to first responders and could mean the difference between loss of property and loss of life. The integrated CSM solution provides a capability to quickly assess the association of process data and emergency response. A first responder logging into the emergency response module of the CSM solution would be provided with all necessary data to assess a situation. Makeup of the chemicals associated in the process deviation, meteorological data, trended analyses of relevant circumstantial data, and all emergency procedures are in place. Traditionally, emergency responders spend the first valuable minutes of their assessment tracking down individuals who might know what is going on, now, through the integration of process, historical, and stored data through the CSM strategy, the necessary information can even be delivered to hand held devices prior to first responder arrival. The result is quick, on-target assessment of the critical or emergency situation and ultimately faster resolution. It is important to know that in studies conducted by the ASM consortium, it has been determined that one day of process downtime can negate an entire years optimized production and investment in process optimization. There is more at risk than many executives want to believe.
Corporate crisis management(Return to contents)
The corporate component of an enterprise CSM program is crucial to effective organizational response to crises of all kinds that effect the image, profitability and future of the organization. The most important component of corporate CSM is the rapid and accurate accumulation of information on the nature, causes and impacts of a critical situation and the controlled dissemination of information to the company's many constituents. This requires a number of responsive and efficient mechanisms for information acquisition and dissemination.
The Corporate component of the CSM Solution provides direct and immediate information and data on critical situations that occur at the plant level and as additional infrastructure is built up surrounding corporate communications, component addressing high-level corporate functions will be incorporated as well. This will encompass functions such as marketing, sales, legal and customer relations. Corporate crisis management officials can access a plant crisis or emergency on PlantSafe through the company's Intranet system and have available up to the minute details. This capability leaves little room for miscommunication and out-of-date situational reports.
The Corporate CSM organization can also utilize the CSM system to access detailed automated action recommendations that have been configured for any kind of crisis or critical situation. It will allow access to details such as plant profiles, various constituency lists, and provide a range of templates for building media releases, shareholder notifications, and other internal and external information dissemination materials and mechanisms.
The continuity provided by this technology can have a significant impact on the ability of the corporate organization to respond rapidly to mitigate the serious impact that a company-wide crisis can have on a corporation. The capability to instantly view details of an evolving crisis situation directly from plant sources puts the corporate organization in a position to confidently manage and influence the overall effects of a crisis.
For more information: GeoSphere Systems, 100 South Main St., Doylestown, PA 18901. Phone: 215-340-2204. Fax: 215-340-2205.
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