It is tough to make the call to upgrade your Distributed Control System (DCS) and other plant automation systems. On one hand, it may not be “broken” or obsolete. On the other hand, your current system may be introducing added risk from unplanned outages or poor abnormal situation management, or adding unnecessary maintenance cost. With Solomon’s Worldwide Automation Performance Analysis (Automation Study), you have the ability to see how your peers are handling these issues.
Our goal is to compare the various control systems practices and staffing levels of your facility to actual industry data to help you ensure that your DCS and other plant automation systems are in line with others within your industry. This gives your planning team the knowledge to know you are expending the right amount of effort and capital to keep you in line with industry peers and maintain reliability.
You can learn more about the study by downloading the brochure on the Automation Study or contacting the Study Manager, Jon Stroup, at +1.972.739.1726 or via email at Jon.Stroup@Solomononline.com.
The Automation Study examines your refinery’s process stability and profit maximization levels in terms of:
- Distributed Control Systems (DCS)
- Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC)
- Safety Instrumentation Systems (SIS)
- Plant Historians
- Adopting newer technologies
- Risk Reduction Strategies in safety instrumented systems, cyber security and alarm management
Compare the various control systems practices and staffing levels of your facility to actual industry data. We compare Distributed Control Systems (DCS), Programable Logic Controlers (PLC), Safety Instrumentation Systems (SIS), Plant Historians, on-line instrumentation and much more.
This study will give you insight to:
- Determine where and why the industry is using wireless technology.
- Review your process control cyber security practices against actual industry data. Find out the types of cyber security measures that are actually being employed, and obtain a list of the additional measures are being used that your facility has not attempted.
- Compare your process alarm policies, practices and alarm rates with actual industry data.
- Learn the extent of implementation of emergency shutdown SIS systems and compare your design, staffing, and testing practices to the rest of the industry.
Example Automation Study Output Graph
Reported reasons for upgrading core automation systems.
