Digital Transformation in 2024: A Guide

Imagine an intelligent plant, with no surprise equipment failures and no manual data collection–and how it could improve reliability. Imagine, no hidden equipment fouling and no undetected flaring–and what it could mean for sustainability. Imagine, no surprise loss-of-containment and no undetected leaks or spills–and how it could enhance safety. Finally, imagine no manual valves in the wrong position and no non-uniform temperature profiles–and how it could increase production. This is the vision of efficiency and performance that digital transformation promises for process plants. Since automation technology is essential to any digital transformation strategy, automation software and hardware selection is one of the most important decisions a plant can make.

Why: Plant operational challenges

First, to set some context, let’s outline the operational challenges that drive change in most plants today. Broadly speaking, these challenges fall into four operational domains: safety, sustainability, reliability and production. Inefficiencies in these areas are often linked to manual tasks, like data collection and interpretation.
Manual data collection, by reading mechanical gauges or using portable testing devices, is typically done too infrequently to predict problems and is very labor intensive. In some cases there may not be sufficient expertise on-site to interpret the collected data. This can cause a host of problems, including health, safety and environmental (HSE) incidents, over-consumption, flaring, emissions, equipment failure, process downtime, loss of containment and off-spec products.

How: Transformation of work

Plants can overcome these challenges by transforming how work is done across the major operational domains (Table 1) to become more situationally aware, more responsive, more predictive and more productive. When plant managers set aspirational goals like "zero" incidents, "zero" emissions and "zero" downtime, digital automation tools, including threat monitoring, performance monitoring, condition monitoring, process monitoring and remote valve control, make it possible to either meet them all or come very close.
Top-performing plants do this by automating data collection with sensors, automating data interpretation with analytics in artificial intelligence (AI) apps and automating workflow with ERP integration and alarms.

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