The Fountain of Youth for the Aging Industrial Infrastructure, Part 1

Use Modern HMI/SCADA, Mobility, & IoT to Improve Productivity and Reduce Costs

Today’s plants face a multitude of challenges. With growing concern over the knowledge transfer as a generation of workers retire, there are also aging infrastructures, greater productivity challenges and tighter budgets to consider as profitability pressures rise.  What’s more, with budget restrictions, resources for plant systems are often limited, making it difficult to carry out infrastructure modernization, expansion, and technology upgrades.

How can you address these critical challenges while delivering the best return on investment to your organization? Chances are, you cannot easily increase budgets or purchase new equipment.

Left to become as efficient as possible with the assets you have, this means you’ve got to look at your operations holistically to understand and predict what’s happening to make the best decisions for modernizing and optimizing.

The Fountain of Youth for the Aging Industrial Infrastructure

The good news is there are technology and solutions readily available to transform your aging plant infrastructure. They revolutionize what’s possible for today’s industrial organizations.

You can cost effectively modernize your existing HMI/SCADA system, achieving High Performance visualization, real-time information when and where you need it, and the ability to connect the dots between your data, leveraging the Internet of Things (IoT).

The modern HMI/SCADA lets you guide newer operators through the right steps to take. And, you can enable mobility and remote monitoring for greater efficiency.

Welcome to the modern HMI/SCADA system—where machines, data, insights, and people are connected.

In general, challenges at an industrial organization – whether a manufacturer or utility – are rooted in three main areas:

• Availability and reliability: examples include aging infrastructure, productivity and efficiency issues related to downtime, stability of the system, and reliability of the data coming in from the field.

• Risk: examples include compliance concerns, quality, cybersecurity and physical security, reporting, and errors due to high workforce turnover and experienced operators retiring.

• Cost: examples include waste, training newer operators, energy costs, maintenance, and more.

How do you reduce cost without compromising availability? How do you mitigate risks while keeping costs under control?

Modern HMI/SCADA

The modern HMI/SCADA helps to reduce operating cost, maintain a high level of operations, ease compliance with evolving regulatory standards, and increase the efficiency of the field operators. Additionally, you can use this control layer as a foundation for digital transformation to be better prepared for the future.

By modernizing HMI/SCADA, industrial organizations can directly address the three main challenges in several ways:

High availability and reliability

•        Secure-by-design SCADA
•        Disaster recovery architecture
•        Information anytime, anywhere

Risk Management

•        Reliable data management
•        Effective alarm management
•        Consistent operating processes
•        Improved communication and collaboration across teams

Cost Management

•        More efficient operators
•        Enhanced operations visibility
•        Effective data analysis

As examples of modern HMI/SCADAs, check out our latest versions of iFIX and CIMPLICITY, part of the Proficy software family. iFIX and CIMPLICITY have been delivering results in thousands of plants around the world for decades. See how these modern HMI/SCADAs are a Fountain of Youth for your aging industrial infrastructure – significantly reducing time-to-value with Rapid Application Development tools including HTML5, centralized configuration, Python support, MQTT, and more.

Updating your aging industrial infrastructure means providing contextually relevant information for operators, facilitating situational awareness, and increasing productivity and reducing risk. It’s time to tap into the Fountain of Youth and see how modern HMI/SCADA delivers faster time-to-insights and improved efficiency for your plant operators.

Read 10 tips for modernizing your HMI/SCADA solution in part 2.