What's Included with PlantTriage?

Real-Time Performance Assessor	Process Control Consultant
Benchmarking & Key Assessments	Biggest Payback Loops
Six-Sigma Tools	Bulk Database Import Tools
Service & Training	Historian & Trending
Integrated Loop Tuning Tools	Oscillation Detection
Active Model Capture Technology (pdf)

---

PlantTriage Real-time Performance Assessor

PlantTriage^® is an enterprise-wide, automation monitoring, and diagnostic system. PlantTriage pinpoints opportunities where maximum economic impact to operations can be realized.

PlantTriage assessor monitors and evaluates over 40 separate analytical measures for every loop in your plant. All of these measures are archived for historical trending of each performance measure. Or any combination can be viewed if detailed analysis is desired. In addition all the performance measures are made available via OPC — so you can make them available to anyone, anytime, anywhere.

PlantTriage performance assessments include these categories of assessments:

• Oscillation detection and diagnosis makes it easy to eliminate costly oscillations. White paper on oscillation detection and diagnosis
• Field instrument diagnostics — All diagnostics are done on-line with normal operating data, non-intrusively, ensuring maximum availability with minimum intervention. These diagnositcs let you perform reliability centered (or condition based) maintenance. This predictive maintenance focuses personnel on areas that will make the biggest difference.

  PlantTriage takes a holistic view of the field sensor, the controller, and the final actuator in context to its role in larger plant operational objectives. PlantTriage puts performance assessment into proper context. No one else can do this.
  Find out more

• Controller performance assessment PlantTriage is continually performing controller performance assessments. These assessments inform you of opportunities to improve the performance of your controllers. Also they provide an early indication of problems.
  Find out more
• Interaction detection finds all control loops oscillating at the same period.

• Process modeling Unique to ExperTune's software, PlantTriage is continually and silently monitoring every part of the process in the plant. It is automatically scanning the data for locations where good models can be developed. PlantTriage continually develops process models, and predicts controller performance improvement opportunities based on real world criteria. PlantTriage also assigns a goodness or model quality to each model found.

  A shift in process dynamics indicates equipment wear, fouling, changing heat transfer coefficients, etc. Tracking process dynamics gives a process plants a pre-emptive indication for equipment maintenance requirements.
  Find out more

• Control System Availability
Get the most out of your control system. The more it is available and usable, the more you will get out of your plant. Controllers in manual mode, stuck at a limit or with lots of mode changes represent hidden opportunities.
Find out more
• Basic statistics PlantTriage is continually assessing, and tracking basic statistics from your plant. These can all be viewed via the web browser interface and PlantTriage will automatically generate pdf reports of these statistics for any area, unit operation, plant, or the entire corporation. The reports can be for any window of time.
  Find out more

All are available via browser-based pages or pdf reports emailed to users that subscribe.

PlantTriage Process Control Consultant

An expert system component of PlantTriage, the Consultant is designed by world-renowned process control expert Greg Shinskey. The consultant diagnoses problems and recommends specific control strategies for improvement.

Greg Shinskey is a world-renowned, award-winning, process control expert with hundreds of published papers and seven published books. In the consultant, his lifetime experience has been condensed into the most important cause and effect diagnosis commonly found in process control systems. Simply answer a few questions about the your control problem and the consultant provides diagnosis and recommendations. The recommendations may include control design changes, process changes, or instrumentation changes. The Control Consultant instantly brings the very best of Greg Shinskey's 50 years of experience to your desktop.

PlantTriage Monitor

PlantTriage baselines the performance of your plant for future comparison. Compare your plant against the baseline to see how the changes you make improve the performance.

PlantTriage continually monitors and assesses the performance of each area in the plant giving you complete control of how you baseline or compare performance. Each loop in the plant is assigned a baseline of performance and a threshold to compare against.

PlantTriage Benchmarking and Key Assessments

PlantTriage templates allow you to very quickly benchmark for your plant using assessments that are important for your business. For example, this could include any combination of variability, average error, standard deviation of the controller output, oscillation indication, oscillation diagnosis, etc.

Use PlantTriage "Best Practice" templates or completely customize your own for complete control of the benchmark process. The templates let you benchmark the plant, from a time window you choose, by selecting minimum, maximum, average, X number of standard deviations, a fixed value, or no change. Apply the templates to a unit operation, entire plant or a group of loops you define.

Using PlantTriage templates, you can easily baseline a unit operation, group of loops, or the entire plant. Graphically zoom to a time window when the plant was operating well, or where you want to establish the benchmark for your plant and click Set.

PlantTriage templates allow you to very quickly select for your plant the assessments that are important for your business. For example, this could include any combination of variability, average error, standard deviation of the controller output, oscillation indication, oscillation diagnosis, etc.

Use PlantTriage default templates or completely customize your own for complete control of baseline and threshold performance settings. The templates let you customize the setting of baseline and threshold assessments, from a time window you choose, by selecting minimum, maximum, average, X number of standard deviations, a fixed value, or no change. Apply the templates to a unit operation, entire plant or a group of loops you define.

For example, you may want to baseline the average error of the PV for all flow loops using assessments from last week. Select the appropriate template, zoom in on the window of data from last week, and click "set baselines". At the same time, your template could specify a threshold limit over which you do not want the average error to exceed. For example, you can set templates for flow, temperature, pressure, any group of loops, unit operation or the entire plant.

PlantTriage continually monitors the plant and assesses the performance against the baselines and thresholds you define. Trend any assessment against its baseline, or prioritize loops needing attention based on how close assessments are to thresholds.

PlantTriage Biggest Payback Loops

Logon to PlantTriage through your web browser and click on "Biggest Payback Loops." The "Biggest Payback Loops" are those loops that by improving will yield the greatest economic return. The higher the Average Economic Assessment the greater the benefit to your plant you will achieve by improving the loop.

Click on any individual loop to drill down for an instant detailed diagnosis of the problem. Apply the integrated PID loop tuning and analysis tools to the loops at the top of the list. This will have the greatest economic impact in your plant.

Biggest Payback Loops answers this question for maintenance engineer: "What can I do today that will have the greatest impact on my plant?" This window is probably a starting point for Process Control Technicians or Engineers whose responsibility it is to maintain the plant. These are the loops where they will focus their optimization analysis using the included Advanced PID Tuner.

PlantTriage Optimization Analysis

All the tools from ExperTune's Advanced PID Tuner/Analyzer are seamlessly integrated into PlantTriage. After PlantTriage has pinpointed those loops that will yield the greatest payback, use the included PID Tuner Analyzer tools to diagnose and optimize the loop.

For example, the window below shows the Word report created from testing the stiction in a poor performing loop. The report shows stiction of about 1.2%—the valve needs some maintenance.

More info on Biggest Payback Loops

PlantTriage and Six Sigma

PlantTriage enables implementing Six Sigma techniques. PlantTriage categorizes and defines processes as unit operations in your plant. PlantTriage provides the benchmarking to Measure your current performance on a unit operation basis. PlantTriage analyzes the data and pinpoints and prioritizes the problems to solve. PlantTriage includes all the tools in PID Tuner to then Improve the process and performance. Use PlantTriage benchmarking and Biggest Payback Loops as the Control to keep the plant running optimally.

Six sigma is an analytical method with the goal of achieving defect-free processes. Sigma represents the standard deviation in a bell shaped curve. One sigma represents over 50% defects while six Sigma represents 3.4 defects per million.

Six Sigma is a methodical technique for reducing subjectiveness in analysis of problems. A common Six Sigma approach is:

1. Define a process where improvements can be made.
2. Measure the process to determine current performance.
3. Analyze this information to pinpoint problems.
4. Improve the process and performance.
5. Set up Controls to prevent future problems.

PlantTriage DCS Database Import

PlantTriage DCS Database Import provides an easy way to quickly set up your plant for monitoring and assessment.

The initial challenge in monitoring and assessing an entire plant, is setting up the addresses for all the loops. PlantTriage makes this easy by using a smart wizard-based bulk import. The wizard (Patent Pending) has intelligence so that it polls the control system for most of the data it needs.

The result is that PlantTriage imports, from your database, only the information necessary for the PlantTriage wizard to set up your loop. PlantTriage reads as much information as possible from the process control computer.

Optionally a user could enter loop addresses in Excel and direct PlantTriage to use Excel. Or you could run the PlantTriage Wizard individually on each loop.

Once setup, PlantTriage will monitor and assess every loop in the plant, ensuring the plant is running at its optimum.

PlantTriage Startup Service and Training

Purchase of a PlantTriage license includes 2 service periods. This service is at locations around the world by ExperTune’s Training Partners who are world class experts who use ExperTune tools on a daily basis to optimize control loops. When our Training Partners train you to optimize your plant, they speak with conviction because they are trainers who are experienced engineers.

The first service period included with PlantTriage is to set up PlantTriage unit operations, data collection and the relative economic priority of your loops. During the second service period, you work with a TOP engineer to determine what are the key assessments for your type of industry. The TOP engineer will have suggested key assessments to use. Then you select a window of time for a baseline or benchmark for your plant. Using this information PlantTriage templates are put to work to very quickly set up PlantTriage Tracker and prioritized tasks. The benchmark of assessments might be the average value, six sigma value, or a constant.

During this second service session, the TOP engineer will train you how to use the Advanced PID Tuner/Analyzer to diagnose and repair the loops that bubble to the top of the Biggest Payback Loop list.

PlantTriage Historian and Trending

PlantTriage Historian is a full featured data historian package specifically designed to make pinpointing process improvement opportunities easy. All process variables and performance measures are archived for complete viewing any time in the future.

PlantTriage obtains data from your process direct in real-time via OPC. PlantTriage also supports obtaining data direct from your plant historian via OPC HDA (Historical Data Access).

Learn more about the PlantTriage Historian

Get More Information sent to you on PlantTriage

Sign up for a Web Seminar on PlantTriage.

Latest Updates in PlantTriage