How RSU helps improve the efficiency of an oil and gas industry operator
A modern distributed control system (DCS) equipped with industrial intelligence capabilities simplifies operators' work and improves their situational awareness, helping them make the right decisions faster and easier. How? By providing operators with clear and actionable information and helping them solve problems in real time.
1. Improved alarm control
Outdated alarm systems are a sore point for many oil and gas companies. They can generate distracting alarms and lack historical information, often forcing workers to waste time trying to determine the cause of such alarms, often repeating the process.
A modern DCS can streamline alarms at your facility to reduce their number. For example, at one gas processing plant, Rockwell Automation's PlantPAx® DCS eliminated uninformative alarms and reduced the average alarm rate to a manageable ten per day.
A modern DCS can also make alarms actionable. As a result, when alarms occur, operators immediately understand what and how urgently they need to act, reducing the time and cost of troubleshooting and troubleshooting, thereby reducing downtime and production losses.
2. More proactive maintenance
As companies transition to a digital oilfield and connect to the production environment, intelligent devices are becoming increasingly common. These devices can help proactively improve asset reliability and avoid downtime—but only if you can understand their underlying data.
A modern DCS transforms raw data into high-quality analytics, providing operators with insight into the condition and performance of equipment at a plant or field. It alerts operators when equipment is near failure and when these failures are likely to occur.
This tool will help you improve your maintenance strategy by prioritizing when assets need to be serviced or replaced and scheduling these tasks during scheduled maintenance periods.
3. Making decisions based on recommendations
Like many other industries, the oil and gas industry is experiencing a shortage of skilled personnel. Operators with 20-30 years of experience are retiring, and a new generation of less experienced workers is taking their place.
Modern DCS systems can mitigate the problems associated with such employee turnover. Specifically, a DCS with a high-performance human-machine interface (HMI) can provide new employees with important information and guide them to the right decisions in various production or maintenance scenarios. This is achieved through situational awareness techniques and graphical screen design, which helps operators focus and improve reaction times. Designing an interface that eliminates distractions from irrelevant data and managing operator navigation improves process visibility, decision-making efficiency, and safety.
This type of assistive technology reduces reliance on other specialists' knowledge when making key production decisions. It also speeds up the onboarding process for employees, which will be crucial for managing turnover among the new generation of young workers, most of whom are less inclined to stay with the same company for decades, as their predecessors did.
View obsolescence as an opportunity
Many companies today are using legacy systems that are nearing the end of their useful life. While we believe that obsolescence itself merits a modern system upgrade, we understand that this is often not enough to motivate management to modernize. However, modernization can bring far greater benefits.
A modern DCS with intelligent production management and a high-performance HMI can significantly improve operator efficiency—even a new employee can become almost as efficient as the most experienced operator within a few weeks. More efficient employees inevitably lead to improved business performance.
This article is based on material from our partner, Rockwell Automation.