Enhanced accessibility into operational and equipment data has surged a transformation in the process manufacturing industry. Engineers can now see both historical and time-series data from their operation as it’s happening and at remote locations, so entire teams can be up-to-speed continuously and reliably. The only problem with this? Finding their team is “DRIP”—Data rich, information poor.
With tremendous amounts of data, a lack of proper organization, cleansing, and contextualizing only puts process engineers at a standstill. Some chemical environments have 20,000 to 70,000 signals (or sensors), oil refineries can have 100,000, and enterprise sensor data signals can reach millions.
These amounts of data can be overwhelming, but tactfully refining it can lead to greatly advantageous insights. Many SMEs and process engineers’ valuable time is filled with sorting through spreadsheets to try to wrangle the data, and not visualizing and analyzing patterns and models that lead to effective insight. With advanced analytics, process manufacturers can easily see all up-to-date data from disparate sources and make decisions based on the analysis to immediately improve operations.
Moving data from “raw” to ready for analysis should not take up the majority of your subject matter experts’ time. Some organizations in today’s world still report that over 70 percent of their time involved with operational analytics is only dedicated to cleansing their data.
But your team is not “data janitors.” Today’s technology can take care of the monotonous and very time-consuming tasks of accessing, cleansing, and contextualizing data so your team can move straight to benefitting from the insights.
For an entire generation, spreadsheets have been the method of choice for analyzing data in the process manufacturing industry. At the moment of analysis, the tool in use needs to enable user input to define critical time periods of interest and relevant context. Spreadsheets have been the way of putting the user in control of data investigation while offering a familiar, albeit cumbersome, path of analysis.
But the downfalls of spreadsheets have become increasingly apparent:
All of these pain points combine to an ultimate difficulty to reconcile and analyze data in the broader business context necessary for profitability and efficiency use cases to improve operational performance.
With advanced analytics, experts in process manufacturing operations on the front lines of configuring data analytics, improvements to the production’s yield, quality, availability, and bottom-lines are readily available.
Advanced analytics leverages innovations in big data, machine learning, and web technologies to integrate and connect to all process manufacturing data sources and drive business improvement. Some of the capabilities include:
Simply put, advanced analytics gives you the whole picture. It draws relationships and correlations between specific data that need to be made in order to improve performance based on accurate and reliable insight. Seeq’s advanced analytics solution is specifically designed for process manufacturing data and has been empowering and saving leading manufacturers time and money upon immediate implementation. Learn more about the application and how it eliminates the need for spreadsheet exhaustion here.
