Are you looking for an easy way to increase plant safety, improve productivity, reduce unplanned downtime, foster continuous improvement, and ensure compliance?

Keep reading for an example of how alerts on your machines, such as Bodymakers in the metal packaging industry, can positively impact your business.

Alerting plant personnel of growing issues before they get out of hand is a great way to accomplish these goals.  Too many meaningless alerts can create a nuisance and sabotage your goals.  Let Acumence identify if there are problems or issues which someone needs to take care of, so in the meantime, you can keep doing your job.

This article on alarming explains how to optimize alarm systems referencing the ISA-18.2 standard to enable operations to react to process critical events free from distractions and use alarms to their full potential.

New Alerting Features in Acumence Version 6.1

Acumence 6.1 adds features to the alerting functionality to help create meaningful alerts and foster continuous improvement.  Don’t spend time staring at dashboards; use alerts to identify issues, notify key contacts, and provide suggested solutions or additional areas to investigate.

New Alert Escalation Options

What happens when someone is not available to address an alert?  Alerts can be lost or overlooked.  With the new alert options, they can be automatically escalated.  If issues don’t get resolved in a set time frame, the alert can be escalated with options to increase the severity and notify different personnel or distribution groups.  The escalation option allows time to investigate issues while increasing visibility when problems remain unresolved.

Alert Priority

What is the difference between an alert pointing out a possible problem that could happen in a couple of days and an immediate problem?  Using priorities, alerts can be categorized into different levels of severity.  This allows personnel to understand the urgency of an issue and better prioritize where time is spent.  Notifications can be customized to fit the level of the alert priority.  This includes users or groups of users that get notified as well as the notification mechanism.   Low priority alarms can be addressed when there is time, while urgent alarms may be sent via SMS, allowing an immediate response.

Alerts Delivered via SMS or Email

Time is money.  For most people today the phone in your pocket is the quickest way to communicate an issue.  Acumence can be configured to send emails or text messages to the right person, or group of people, no matter where they are.  There is no need to continuously monitor dashboards to see if issues need your attention.  Built-in notification via SMS and email is now available.

Notification Groups

Personnel turnover happens.  Getting the new worker set up quickly is important.  With Acumence 6.1, alerts can be defined at a group level.  Within Acumence, alerts can be sent to specific groups by site, user role, alert groups, alert priorities, etc.

Bodymaker Alert Example

Here we give an example of how alerting can tackle problems to add business value.

• Problem: The rate of spoilage for a bodymaker often increases as tooling reaches the end of life.  When this occurs, it may be time to replace the tooling and perform maintenance.  On a Bodymaker, figure out when a high number of short cans is caused by low remaining tool life before high scrap rates are produced.
• Solution:  Bodymaker and tooling data are continually collected via sensors and tool control software integration.  Acumence offers integration with IPS Tool Control software which can be used to predict estimated tool life.  The estimated remaining tool life metric can be combined with bodymaker short can defects to alert operators when tools may require maintenance.  Setpoints are used to allow configurable thresholds to fine-tune when an alert is activated.
• Notifications: When the tool maintenance alert is activated, it can be displayed on a dashboard for up to the second status.

With high-priority alerts that need immediate attention, an email or SMS message can also be sent directly to operators who can investigate and take steps to resolve the issue.  The alert message below describes the issue, provides important context, and suggests steps to continue the investigation.  Providing a link to the Acumence real-time client dashboard with bodymaker-specific data allows users to see the full context and quickly make decisions on how to proceed.

Summary: Acumence’s alerting features enable actionable information to be delivered to the right audience, allowing problems to be addressed quickly and efficiently.  Notification templates make it easy to configure alert notifications that include plant data, drive behavior, and provide suggested actions.

Conclusion

Utilizing the ISA018.2 standard can increase operational efficiency by reducing nuisance alarms, stale alarms, and alarm flooding.  The new Acumence Smart Alerts can help reach these goals by sending the right alerts to the right person at the right time.