« Back

Batch Boosters

Home / News / Batch Boosters

News

Reduce the execution and validation effort by standardizing

We can greatly benefit from understanding what others have done, standards encapsulate the current best approach as seen by an individual or team. For end-users, these automation standards can be defined by associations and range from homegrown to corporate-driven.

The International Society of Automation (ISA) is well established by providing best practices from expert experiences and can be used to avoid starting each project from the ground up. These standards provide a reference point for communication between all team members and can be used to clearly define expectations.

As automation professionals, we find it interesting how these standards are not fully understood. Systems are implemented by individuals that do not fully understand these standards, yet think they do. Their implementations fall short of the system’s potential and the end-user ends up with a sub-optimal system. It is like listening to a kid tell the world that he knows how to ride a bicycle, and in his mind, he does. We all understand things to different degrees, just as the kid, we see the same in the implementation of batch projects. Some end-users and system integrators truly have a grasp on these standards, others learn about them for the first time during the implementation of an ongoing project which is not optimal.

(more…)

Leveraging ISA-88 Standards for Discrete Manufacturing

Tracking manual discrete manufacturing processes can greatly benefit from off-the-shelf products.

Often, discrete manufacturing processes requiring a high level of manual operator activities that rely on paper-based Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) to specify how to manufacture their products.

Operators are responsible to perform the tasks as specified by the SOP as well as capturing the required data when requested. It is not uncommon to find plants that have automated components of the manufacturing process but require the operators to input the setpoints before initiating the required tasks. These operators are also responsible for capturing the required data and writing it on the SOPs, some of these SOP steps require capturing a date stamp as well as information of the person that performed a task or captured the data. Some customers require tracking these activities with more reliability and would like to capture information with much greater granularity.

(more…)

Recipe version control and released to production functionality

You may already have it — Recipe Life Cycle Management— and don’t know it. Recipe procedures encapsulate the best practices in performing your processing tasks, but are you sure that what is being produced is what everyone agreed to produce?

Who edited it?
Where is the correct version?
Who approved the recipe to be released?

In practice, recipe version control and released to production functionality in plants range from great to sometimes not at all. This can also be true for people using Factory Talk Batch. (more…)