Imagine one of your frontline workers detecting a problem before it manifests itself: before the gasket blows, before the gauge hits the red, before a key machine goes offline. Using the OSIsoft PI connector within Viewport, people responsible for the prevention of downtime can visualize critical, timely information. The result is unprecedented situational awareness that optimizes your operations, reduces downtime, and keeps revenue flowing.
Are there issues lurking right now that threaten the health of your operations? It’s reasonable to assume that – without providing the right people with the right information at their fingertips – it’s simply a matter of time before a gasket blows, a gauge hits the red, a machine goes down.
Unfortunately, we are all familiar with the term “downtime”. The downtime could occur due to such things as a power outage, an accident on the line, or if a piece of machinery breaks down. What does it cost your organization when a key process goes down? Obviously, the most direct impact of downtime is a loss of production capacity. Then come higher labor costs, lost revenue, expensive external consultants, deadline delays, missed quotas…
The downtime basically amounts to the total wasted business support costs and business opportunities lost in the event of production being on hold, as well as the resources needed to fix the cause of the downtime incident. Therefore, reducing downtime is the key to a healthy bottom line. It is imperative that those responsible for maintenance and repair, keep the facilities up and running smoothly.
In the inevitable case of downtime occurring, employees should be able to repair machines quickly and safely. Having staff who are trained to assess and troubleshoot issues is a critical aspect of reducing downtime. However, do those employees get easy access to the most recent information? Do they have the tools necessary to do the assessment and troubleshooting?
So many organizations struggle with finding the right and actual information. Working with multiple document management systems that often store different types of information, multiple versions of it, but also do not connect or link to each other. In such cases, maintenance staff is often delayed by administrative and technical issues preventing them from executing their work.
However, there is an elegant solution. With the Viewport OSIsoft PI Connector real-time information (such as temperatures, pressure readings, on/off or open closed states, etc.) is visualized directly within technical drawings and operational documents.
Instead of being buried out of sight in another system, pertinent data is embedded directly inside P&IDs and procedures, empowering your staff to quickly spot issues, troubleshoot problems, and optimize the entire system. The result is actionable data that increases uptime improves safety and reduces risk.
One of the great advantages of Viewport is that it does not store data from OSIsoft. However, it retrieves the data on-demand through a custom web service that is installed on the Viewport web server. The server connects to a framework as an intermediate layer. There, relevant P&ID tags can be mapped to relevant PI tags to make things work smoothly and without any hassle. Real-time and clear.
To keep everything operating and performing at the maximum level, periodic maintenance is required. However, it also possible to develop an automated importer to keep the mapping in Asset Framework up-to-date.
Installation and implementation of the connector and web service usually take around 4 hours. To generate the mapping in the next phase takes between 4 and 32 hours. In this period mapping between P&ID tags and PI tags takes place. This variety in required time depends on how standardized the different tag names are and to what extent current settings can be used. To conclude the implementation, around 1 hour is necessary to import the mapping into the PI Asset Framework. To make sure everything operates as expected, small iterations may be necessary to ensure that the mapping is as complete as possible.
Do you have any questions about the Viewport OSIsoft PI Connector? Get in touch with our experts. You can reach by sending your question through the contact form.