John Josserand, InCite Logix
Process industries have hung on to old technology for way too long. Please make it stop! In our past 25 years of trips around the sun, we’ve watched technology do some wild things to processes and data. We’ve had exposure to using coding on multiple platforms to solve problems and, basically, help us with our daily work lives. It’s easy to stay complacent.
With advances from the typewriter to the word processor and the slide rule to the calculator, we have watched our processing plants weave themselves around “new” systems that represent everything from a Smithsonian-envied, should-be-fossilized set of programs to the spacey “Star Wars good idea systems” we all hoped would work. I’ve spent the past 20 years trying to make data tell me something good and accurate.
“In the era of information, ignorance is a choice.” – Donald Miller
DIY software technology
You’ve got to love an oil or chemical company that has the desire to enter into the software development business. God bless them; they just want reliable data and easy ways to collect and manipulate data to solve problems. Many applications of technology have worked well, but most not so much. All of them had crazy names or acronyms like Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS), Process Historian, Process Safety Management System, Management Information System, Environmental Management Information System (EMIS) and Laboratory Information Management System (LIMS). Then we dealt with the bazillion software vendors that came with these programs, including the “Homegrown-R-Us,” here-today-gone-tomorrow, flash-in-the-pan software development companies.
As time passed, a few of these database-centered programs stuck around, such as Microsoft® Access, Dbase 4 and one of the most belabored systems on the planet, Microsoft® Excel.
Now, picture you’re a plant manager or any midline leader who’s asking for his or her direct reports with the monthly numbers. Buried in the monthly meeting is that not-so-small voice in your head that says, “I can’t trust this data.”
You may even think, which is worse, “I’ll pay millions to create the ill-fated data warehouse and hope that the gods of APIs will smile on the integration layers that will be needed from now until Judgment Day.” Can I hear an “amen?”
Stop the madness
It’s time to stop the madness. There’s a better way to get what you need from data. Just like Uber’s ridesharing app put the hurt on the taxicab industry, or Airbnb’s private online rental marketplace devalued and retooled the hotel industry practically overnight, we can see that kind of change for the legacy enterprise. Process industries are primed to be “Uber-ized” with emerging data science technology.
New data tools that provide the foundation for future artificial intelligence (AI) now make it possible to get to the information that businesses need in a much more telling way. The day of asking Siri or Alexa, “How’s my cat/alky turnaround going?” is “nigh unto the door.”
Sensor technology now makes it affordable, maybe even mandatory, to “smarten up” our field equipment to remove safety exposure, providing the most effective layer of intelligence yet. Wireless technology has also become ready as location-aware, wearable computers now give us no excuse for lack of process safety awareness.
Welcome to the new frontier
The wild, wild west of process industries now has a chance of becoming a bit more like the rest of civilization. It’s a time of enlightenment and a step-change in capabilities. Let us rise up on the meter that measures our willingness to live with dark data and create pathways to business intelligence that light the way with AI, the block chain, automation and every other emerging technology that drives excellence.
For more info, please contact John Josserand at johnj@incitelogix.com, call 832.647.5665, or visit www.incitelogix.com
