Overview

SCADA systems are the key operational tool that manufacturing and industrial facilities rely on to visualize, troubleshoot, and improve their operations. Afterall, it’s the crucial connection between the process control systems and the humans that orchestrate production. SCADA is a complex computer system that can have limitations. It can be prone to technical resource reliance, communication disruptions, version management, operating system patch requirements as well as susceptible to cyber-attacks, if not maintained properly. When a SCADA system goes down, production goes down and recovery time is of the utmost concern. To guard against such a system disruption, a structured approach to SCADA support and improvement is a component that every company should plan for. This case study discusses ways to engage with an external company in order to augment the depth of resources that can help when issues inevitably occur.

Background

Actemium’s industrial performance improvement services provide SCADA support in 4 key areas: Emergency Assistance, System Improvements, License and Version Upgrades, and Training of Plant resources. This service is provided regardless of SCADA technology. Actemium has long standing customer contracts supporting SCADA types from GE iFix, AVEVA / Wonderware, Rockwell FactoryTalk, and Inductive Ignition to name a few.

Below are some examples of our work:

Emergency Assistance – This is a structured support service designed to answer the call from a manufacturer on a 24×7 basis and get the systems up and running again to maintain production. By providing triage for issues through a structured decision tree routing against a Service Level Agreement for response Actemium can guarantee to get your plant back up to full speed. The majority of Emergency Assistance requests are addressed remotely and help is received within minutes from experienced control engineers. Better yet, the emergency issues are categorized and tracked for root cause correction and improvement efforts.
Real World Impact– A SCADA outage can be addressed in short order allowing production to resume with full use of the system opposed to limping along for hours waiting for overtaxed plant resources to arrive.

System Improvements – Emergency assistance and engagement with the operations and maintenance teams in a facility unveils issues that often run under the radar in a plant. These nagging problems are addressed by the improvement component of support services. The support team gets an agreement on the scope of the improvement, sets a plan to fix, and executes the fix to remove the issue. This service is performed within the framework of the project.
Real World Impact– After an outage, the support team uncovered several deficiencies throughout the production process. Once modifications were made and some PLC logic improved batch execution time and overall turnaround.

License and Version Upgrades – Being an OT-based system and due to its level of uptime requirements, the SCADA software cannot be upgraded nor patched in the same manner as an IT based application. Care and planning must occur to ensure a non-disruptive result of the upgrades. The support team takes a structured approach to this service and sets a schedule for the upgrades that aligns well with the demands of production taking care to ensure proper backup and recovery approaches have been considered.
Real World Impact– After upgrades occurred on an isolated SCADA system a number of key issues that affected reliability were resolved and overall system stability was achieved.

Training of Plant Resources – In addition to System Improvements, Emergency Assistance also unveils areas to improve the understanding of the SCADA with the operations and maintenance teams through training. Often issues are created by well-intended people that do not have adequate training on how to use and troubleshoot the SCADA. When seeing this issue, the Actemium support team provides on-the-spot training and often extends to a more formal, classroom-based session. Additionally, with turnover challenges inside of plants, the Actemium team becomes a consistent resource for historical perspective to engage in ideas and spin up of new plant team members.
Real World Impact– Over the duration of a 5-year relationship Actemium has trained dozens of operators and maintenance personnel as well as spun up 3 different Plant Engineering resources— meaning Actemium created many experts to support the system. The team has been a consistent, reliable partner, regardless of who we were working with.

Conclusion

With SCADA being a critical operational tool, engaging a stable and reliable partner to complement plant and corporate resources is critical. Things are bound to happen to a SCADA system, but having someone available with the expertise to troubleshoot quickly is invaluable. A dedicated team focusing on preventing future problems from arising and continuously focusing on improvements is critical to maintaining success. And Actemium is determined to deliver that success.