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Process Industries

Maximizing plant up time
and cutting costs
 are not objectives ...

They are a way of life!

Your Challenge

Low margins demand maximum plant up time to keep costs as low as possible. Achieving these production levels requires solving problems before they can affect safety, the environment, regulatory compliance, or product quality. Moreover, you have fewer people, with less direct experience, to keep up with these demands.

Your Environment

• You operate complex plants with many sophisticated, interacting systems. Confounding problems appear at odd times and with unusual symptoms, wreaking havoc to the production schedule

• Deep down, you just know that this problem, or something similar, must have happened before, but you have no way of finding out in any sort of reasonable time

• There are people in your organization who should know the answer to almost any problem, but they never seem to be on shift at the time and place the problems are occurring

• “Trial & Error” parts swapping comes with high costs– but production staff have no other options given the time pressures of getting the unit back into service

• Many of your best trouble-shooters are coming up for retirement or could be recruited by your competitors, and this will hamper your ability to provide time-efficient and cost-effective operations

• Executive management is pressing for higher operational performance from their plant assets while continuing to constrain budgets

• The 24/7, cross-functional nature of plant operations compounds the difficulty of sharing troubleshooting knowledge

For more information on these challenges, see Complex Equipment and Our Technology.

The Solution

The solution is a diagnostic decision support system that guides production staff in troubleshooting based on real experiences from across your organization – and once the root cause is determined, points to the appropriate action.

A Diagnostic Decision Support (DDS) system could revolutionize your processing organization.  Moreover, CaseBank has the tools, services, and expertise to help you create it.  CaseBank builds turnkey custom systems, combining CaseBank’s decision support technology and services with your staff’s expert knowledge and experience. 

The system has two main parts:

• The decision support engine is CaseBank’s proprietary case-based reasoning engine, SpotLight, which has been designed specifically for complex equipment and process environments.

• The custom knowledgebase is a structured repository of diagnostic and action information on your equipment and process, developed by CaseBank’s specialized knowledgebase development staff using your experience and expertise. 

The DDS system is a simple to use, easily fielded tool that:

• Captures and efficiently stores the knowledge and expertise of all of your stall who have worked on a problem – the knowledge of your most experienced troubleshooters will always be available

• Acts as an expert mentor who works alongside your troubleshooter, posing questions that quickly isolate the root cause of a fault – an assistant with a perfect memory

• Enables first time fixes on any shift with any crew

• Continuously captures new knowledge without additional burden on the troubleshooter

• Never goes off shift, never takes a vacation, never changes jobs, and never retires

• Tracks all troubleshooting activities, providing visibility to management

The Benefits

Prevent troubleshooting the same problem from scratch by significantly improving knowledge retention, knowledge leveling and recall.

Improve early symptom identification, reducing the potential for unsafe conditions.

Eliminate the need to memorize reports and events for troubleshooting of future problems - automating knowledge sharing between departments and/or plants greatly enhances the cross-functional knowledge flow and decision process.

Increase flexibility in responding to market forces by shortening the learning curve for new or transferred staff

Reduce resource and training costs.

These benefits are achieved by:

• Reducing the number and duration of process upsets

• Reducing diagnostic time

• Detecting symptoms earlier and taking corrective action

• Increasing your employee average diagnostic knowledge and quality of response to excursions

• Shortening training time requirements and experiencing fewer learning mistakes

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