09 May

The Importance of Employees in Predictive Management

by Synergy Systems in Engineering & Automation Experts

In a perfect world, no plants would have to experience downtime for repairs and maintenance. While technology may never achieve that level of perfection, advanced technologies have grown better at preventing the need to halt operations for repairs. It all boils down to predictive maintenance and support.

Predictive maintenance is twofold, involving both site assets and employees. Dollars spent on equipment should focus on optimized measurement. Systems and alarms can be put in place so that all vital elements are continuously monitored. In this way, all information that can possibly be aimed at reducing downtime. Whether or not these assets effectively reduce the need for downtime is all up to the plant engineers.
We always stress the value and importance of client engineers throughout a project. Everything we put into an optimized control system is tailored toward the needs of client employees. They’re action is key to predictive maintenance and the reduction of down time.

Good control logic is to prioritize alarms so that the most urgent matters are attended to first. That doesn’t make any alarm less important. They have been programmed into the system for a purpose. Small alarms can alert plant engineers of minor problems which can usually be fixed without any downtime.

These are the kinds of alarms that reduce downtime. When left alone, small problems can snowball into huge events that require downtime and expensive repairs. Attention to minor alarms can save a business huge amounts of money. With advanced, optimized control systems, plant employees can come that much closer to perfect predictive management.

02 May

The Importance of Expert Project Managers

by Synergy Systems in Engineering & Automation Experts

Here at Synergy, we often boast about our ability to handle project management tasks. From the goal setting kickoff to the startup completion of a project, we are there taking full responsibility. This is a significant advantage to our clients. Technical skills are uniquely different from management skills, which is why we make a point provide expert engineers with both.

Technically minded people are focused on the control systems, HMIs and computer jargon that go into the creation of a product. Their skill set is essential, as their work creates the vital components clients use to run their processes. Making sure those components match client goals is the responsibility of the project manager.

In addition to technical expertise, a project manager must have the proper skills to evaluate risk and goals, create a schedule and foster communication between all parties. When handled by a system integrator, clients rest assured they are getting quality solutions without having to spend time managing these aspects of a project.

Having an integrator who takes full responsibility and also makes a point to keep clients in the loop as projects progress is invaluable. It releases client manpower that can then be funneled into more important tasks in addition to ensuring a solution that hits all the desired goals and outcomes.

24 Apr

Address your Vulnerabilities in Cyber Security

by Synergy Systems in Industry News

Control Engineering recently published the results of their 2014 Cyber Security study. Data was collected from individuals directly involved in their organization’s cyber security efforts. The most alarming results involved threat levels and vulnerability assessments. A quarter of respondents claimed their threat was high and nearly the same amount reported they had never performed a vulnerability assessment.

Cyber security continues to be a hot topic as plant assets become more interconnected. These systems provide huge benefits for optimization and monetary gain. With each new addition or replacement in a plant, safety and security measures should be considered.

Threat levels can’t always be changed. Certain systems must be connected to the internet and some industries are targets simply by existing. For example, power plants are tied to national security. There is no avoiding the threat level and need for security. The good thing is, effective cyber security is out there.

Vulnerability assessments are crucial to defining where the largest threats are at. When people think of cyber security, they usually consider computer viruses and hackers. While these are very real threats, a vulnerability assessment may bring to light other areas of concern, such as internal threats. The perfect example of this is flash drives. While they may be convenient to use and seem harmless, a person can accidentally transfer a virus with these devices.

Cyber security measures are just as important as plant safety. When systems are at risk, the machines they control may also be at risk. With so much of today’s businesses revolving around cyber data, going without cyber security is no longer an option.

16 Apr

Is There Potential for Google Glasses in Process Industries?

by Synergy Systems in Industry News

This photo, “Glass Magic” is copyright (c) 2014 Erica Joy and made available under an Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic license

For a short time this week, the public was offered the chance to purchase Google Glass. These glasses have the ability to display information, like GPS, emails and weather, right in front of you without blocking vision. The price of $1,500 might seem like a lot for fancy glasses, but they quickly sold out. The world is paying attention, including the worlds of manufacturing, automation and integration.

Perhaps the idea of having a display in the corner of your eye seems superfluous for everyday life, but Google Glass could provide a great addition to safety within process plants. Plant engineers often work with delicate and hazardous machinery. Safety is a top priority because it would often be far too easy for something to go horribly wrong. There has been a lot of talk about mobile devices, such as tablets and smart phones, being used in manufacturing environments, but they still demand the attention of our hands.

The technology that could evolve out of Google Glass removes the need for hands, allowing a person to work with both while still reading information transmitted by the glasses. In a temperature sensitive environment, workers could always have the temperature displays before them. While performing time sensitive work, a time display could sit just on the edge of their vision in the glasses.

Following the tablets and smart phones that came before, it’s only a matter of time before technologies like Google Glass make their way into manufacturing and process plants. While the current model is a bit limited, with the potential to display only one set of information at a time, it’s not that much of a stretch to consider the possibility of safety glasses with displays. Removing the need for engineers to have to leave a task and check a display could even take a step beyond safety and establish a new standard for optimizing personnel within plants and process systems.

10 Apr

Overlooked Benefits of Safety Optimization

by Synergy Systems in Engineering & Automation Experts

Safety is an obvious priority within a process system or a boiler plant. The amount of income that could be lost due to destroyed equipment or injured personnel is enough for any plant manager to take safety seriously. Those who have implemented excellent safety systems have found that they are far more than a safety net. From office culture to monetary savings, optimized safety management offers a multitude of benefits.

The financial benefits of safety management come from the prevention of future malfunctions. While there are certainly aspects of safety that can have an immediate monetary benefit, the prevention aspect carries far more value. When a huge plant has a major malfunction, newscasters love to go on about the millions and sometimes billions of dollars in damage. Avoiding such catastrophes is a huge monetary benefit.

Optimization of alarm management is another great benefit. Part of developing a safety system is understanding what types of issues automation can handle on its own and those that need the guidance of an operator. If a bunch of alarms swarm on a screen all at once, that can create a lot of headaches, even more so if many of the alarms are nuisances. Safety is then compromised if operators can’t quickly decipher which alarm to pay attention to if they get used to ignoring nuisances. Prioritization and optimization of how alarms are handled within in a process system increases safety and frees up operator time for more important tasks.

This brings us to another often overlooked benefit of safety: stress relief and plant culture. Frequent nuisance alarms can create a stressful workplace, especially if there are many alarms appearing at the same time. Even worse, such alarms can contribute to a culture that slacks off when it comes to safety. This is why the human element cannot be ignored when it comes to safety management. An optimized safety system can go far to optimize the workplace as a whole. Make sure to incorporate training into any new safety system so operators understand how the new system benefits the workplace and how to read the alarms.

The preservation of life and property is a huge motivating factor in optimizing process safety systems. This is part of the reason why we stress it as one of our core values. It’s important to also remember the monetary, organizational and cultural benefits optimized safety maintenance can have. Upgrades to safety systems can serve to improve more than just safety, a fact that only adds to the overall value of these systems.

02 Apr

Synergy Vice President Now on Two NFPA 85 Committees

by Synergy Systems in Synergy News & Achievements

Synergy Vice-President, Marc L. Hunter has again been nominated to an NFPA 85 Committee, this time for the atmospheric fluidized bed boiler (FBB) committee. As a member of both FBB and the single burner boiler (SBB) committee for NFPA 85, Hunter plays a critical role in deciding the safety regulations for chapters five and seven of the NFPA 85 code.

NFPA 85 is a broad code, relating to many aspects of boiler and burner safety. For this reason, there are eight sub committees, each responsible for a section of the code. Chapters five and seven go into basics – such as application, purpose and equipment requirements – as well as details on how processes for FBBs and SBBs should function.

“I’m excited to be a part of such a prestigious community,” said Hunter.

These rigorous safety standards are imperative for the safe running of boiler and burner systems. Starting up a boiler and running it properly is like controlling a small explosion. Precise steps must be taken to ensure the safety of all personnel and assets involved.

Working for clients involved in high risk businesses, Synergy prioritizes safety above all other values. Marc L. Hunter’s nomination to not one, but two NFPA 85 sub committees allows us to expertly bring this value to all who adhere to the NFPA 85 code.

26 Mar

What We Can Learn From the 100 Largest Losses

by Synergy Systems in Industry News

Recently, Marsh released its report on the 100 Largest Losses in the hydrocarbon extraction, transport and processing industry from 1974 to 2013. Using the Nelson-Farrar Petroleum Pant Cost Index, the report includes inflated values to show how much these 100 incidents would cost in 2013.

Of the top 20 events, eight have taken place in the United States. Most of those losses are associated with vapor cloud explosions at petrochemical plants. While the study covers 40 years of plant operations, these events are hardly in our past. A petrochemical explosion on June 13^th, 2013 was one of the eight events.

While different sectors were involved in the report, all problems can be narrowed down to a few key areas that exist in all plants: Hardware, Management Systems and Emergency Controls. These are the systems that keep everything running smoothly and their failure can be catastrophic.

One of the easiest ways to ensure your safety systems are always running is to have a maintenance plan in place for routine checkups. The more regular the maintenance, the more you reduce the risk of a catastrophic event. In addition, new and emerging threats should be considered when upgrading hardware and emergency controls. This is why cyber security has been such a huge topic of late. Explosions and natural disasters may be at the heart of these 100 losses, but negligence towards emerging threats leaves the door open to something new creating even more damage.

If you want more information on protecting yourself from all safety threats, contact your local engineering consultants at Synergy Systems Inc.

19 Mar

Top Three Ways Automation can Reduce Raw Material and Fuel Usage

by Synergy Systems in Engineering & Automation Experts

Energy Patriot The ability to procure sustainable value within a process system, boiler room or plant provides a huge advantage to business. By their very nature, these industries use up fuel and raw materials to create products and energy. The less material you need for any given process, the less you have to pay for. When it comes to the production of consumer goods, such as food products, using less material to create the same result means you can create more product.

The secret to sustainability in the process industry is reliability. Instruments should be calibrated for optimized performance and communicate all valuable information to plant engineers. This is where automation’s abilities thrive. Harnessing automation technology in the following ways will generate reliable and sustainable plant instruments.

Preventative and Predictive Maintenance
This sustainability issue doubles as a safety issue. The worst kind of safety maintenance a plant can have is reactive. Control systems should be optimized in such a way that plant engineers are made aware of potential errors before they have a chance to wreak havoc. This kind of automation, however, is only preventative. If you want to take your reliability and sustainability a step further, you will calibrate for predictive maintenance as well. An intelligent control system can record and remember the continuous activities of a plant and learn the signs of a potential problem before an error ever occurs. When preventative and predictive maintenance work in tandem, they create an optimized environment with few, if any, major malfunctions.
Alarm Management and Reduction of Nuisance Trips
Last week, we discussed the importance of alarm prioritization as a method of measurement within the process industry. Alarm management is equally important for sustainability. Every nuisance trip wastes energy and employee time. At the same time, an overabundance of alarms can confuse plant workers and create misunderstandings of which alarm is the most crucial. Control systems can be automated in such a way that all this is resolved. The system will run smoothly and communicate all information in an actionable manner to the plant engineers. This avoids wasted time, materials and cost.
Instrument Reliability Experts
All the above will be for naught if the system isn’t put in place with the kind of care instrument reliability experts provide. Make sure you find an engineering consultant with an in-depth knowledge of what reliability and sustainability mean for your business.

13 Mar

Critical Measurements in a Process Plant

by Synergy Systems in Engineering & Automation Experts

Measurement is often part of the intelligent HMI discussion from the process industry to boiler systems; the measurement and balance of all materials involved is essential. The list of measurable elements in a plant can seem endless, which begs the question; what measurements should you prioritize in order to have the most efficient process?

This question was posed to Marc L. Hunter, our Vice-President, the other day, to which he replied, “That’s not quite the right question to ask.”

He went on to explain that measurement of anything is dependent on two questions. What is going to happen and what should I pay attention to?

The multitude of factors acting in a plant is indicative of the many different activities being performed. Many of these processes can be easily managed by automation and machines. The most important measurement of a plant then becomes alarms.

Alarm management is vital and should be made as proactive as possible. This requires strategic prioritization of alarms. No alarm should be completely ignored, but a smoothly running system must alert engineers to the most pressing alarms first.

Measurement in a plant therefore boils down to ISA 18.2 Alarm Management Standards. A system made to meet these standards alerts plant engineers of any issue using a prioritized list of alarms. This organization allows for the easy identification of the most critical issues. On days where few high risk problems occur, the less important alarms can be dealt with.

How many priority levels you need to adequately measure the performance of your plant requires a detailed discussion with an engineering consultant with alarm management expertise. The alarm management market offers a substantial variety in terms of the number of priorities levels. There isn’t much of a limit to the number of priority levels you can have. An alarm management expert will help you define just what you need to meet your business goals.

06 Mar

The Synergy of Man and Machine

by Synergy Systems in Engineering & Automation Experts

Smart machines only hold as much intelligence as the humans who build and program them. William Hawkins mentions the idea of machines and computers that learn from each other to be frightening. In such an environment, a machine could “learn” to override human actions it interprets as harmful. While current technology and gather, measure and interpret large amounts of data, they lack the ability to learn from it. That job is left to humans who must work in synergy with plant machines.

Having both humans and machines involved in a process system takes advantage of the strengths of each. Machines are an obvious asset with their predictability and ability to withstand steps in the manufacturing processes that are risky for humans. Process and plant engineers, on the other hand, have ingenuity and creativity that can be harnessed as continuous business improvement.

Synergy Systems balances these strengths with a three pronged process. We send our engineering experts directly to client plants and communicate with the process engineers working there. Since plant employees play such a crucial role in the operation of a system, we believe their input is vital to the success of any project. The three things we discuss are what machines should be doing, how they are currently running and how the plant employees would like them to run. Balancing these three realities with the goals of the business is a sure way to achieve success.

When it comes to business success, it is imperative that the strengths of all available assets be used. Cutting-edge technology is only one facet of success. Incorporating the knowledge, needs and ideas of plant employees to work in tandem with technology enables any company to accomplish its highest goals.