A common theme that emerged at ARC Advisory Group's recent Industry Forum in Orlando is that capital projects today frequently take too long to execute, cost too much, and involve too much risk. This costs industrial organizations millions of dollars in capital expenditures and lost production, even for relatively short delays. This impacts both profitability and overall business performance.
Owners and operators of industrial control systems (ICS) face increasing challenges to improve the security of these systems to ensure their safe and reliable operation in the face of evolving threats. Meeting these challenges requires focus on the elements of people, process, and technology.
As discussed in a previous ARC Insight, the downturn in the overall automation market in 2015 was caused by a number of complex and structural reasons. ARC Advisory Group believes that this trend will continue to represent the "new normal" until the next business cycle emerges.
What do plant safety and asset performance management (APM) have in common? As attendees learned in the well-attended "Minimizing Safety Risks with Asset Performance Management" session at ARC Advisory Group's recent Industry Forum in Orlando, Florida, the two fit together "like a hand in a glove." Attendees learned how the proactive view of risks provided by many APM solutions enable industrial organizations to implement an effective, enterprise-wide risk assessment and process hazards analysis program.
Most process plants and facilities are a product of their evolution. For example, many refineries in the United States were originally constructed in the early 1900s and have evolved over a period of over 100 years. These facilities were modernized, expanded, and modernized again to adapt to generational changes in technology, both for production and control. Facilities evolved to be monolithic, and highly customized from an engineering standpoint.
To improve information technology's effectiveness in fulfilling business needs at competitive cost, many industrial organizations now apply processes from the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) to benchmark their own IT performance against KPIs. As more and more companies outsource selected IT activities to be able to deal more efficiently with varying workloads and domain areas, they also need to benchmark the performance of these outsourced IT processes.
In 2015, the entire automation market in China experienced a significant and largely unanticipated downturn. While the automation market had been fluctuating a bit in recent years, most industry participants had maintained a cautiously optimistic outlook for 2015; with the major multinational automation suppliers dialing back their expectations to single-digit growth. But, the final negative results exceeded all previous forecasts.
The focus on operating industrial facilities is to maintain steady-state operations despite frequent disturbances, with operators performing whatever is necessary to keep the facilities running and meet production schedules in a safe and environmentally acceptable way. Traditionally, whether the facility is fully manned, minimally manned, or unmanned; its operations are typically coordinated from a central location in a rigidly hierarchal fashion.
The 20th Annual ARC Industry Forum in Orlando, Florida kicked off this week with over 700 participants. Attendees represented 300 different companies and came from more than 25 countries around the globe. The keynote presentations all reflected the Forum theme, Industry in Transition: Navigating the New Age of Innovation, and served as a call to action for the automation industry.
The process industries struggle to choose between best-in-class products versus integrated solutions from a single supplier. For distributed control systems (DCS), owner-operators across the process industries have chosen integrated, single-supplier solutions.
While a process plant may have DCSs installed from multiple suppliers, these do not interoperate at the control level for (historically) a good reason. Plant safety and reliability depend on the DCS operating in a deterministic and guaranteed manner.