Yokogawa releases "Operations Management" software package
Yokogawa Electric Corporation announced the release of Operations Management, a software package for recording and managing data on the work performed by plant personnel. Yokogawa has developed this solution as part of its Operational Excellence Transformation (a transformation by our customers to achieve operational excellence) through the expanded offering of consulting and solution services that lead to the optimization of the supply chain and operations.
The Operations Management software assists plant operations and management personnel by facilitating the sharing of information on items such as unusual events, work progress, and operation workflows. By digitalizing and standardizing how this data is handled, this software helps plant personnel carry out their work correctly, safely, and efficiently, and thereby enhances corporate value. Yokogawa plan to release a mobile version of this in June.
Development Background
As markets change and global competition intensifies, manufacturers are faced with the challenge of minimizing costs and ensuring high profitability. At manufacturing sites, it is particularly important to improve operational efficiency, facility utilization, and productivity while ensuring safety.
In response to the abovementioned needs, Yokogawa is developing solutions that utilize digital technologies to optimize and automate companies' business processes. These solutions will help to optimize the supply chain and the operation of plant facilities, manage organizational risks, and make maximum efficient use of plant assets to ensure safe, reliable, and profitable operations. These solutions will also help with facility management.
As the Internet of Things (IoT) and the use of big data and artificial intelligence (AI) gain momentum, attention is swinging to how the collection, analysis, and digitization of data can add value by identifying problems at an early stage, making operations more efficient, enhancing management processes, optimizing supply chains, and accelerating decision making. By digitizing and standardizing information based on accumulated know-how and facilitating the exchange of information within and between groups of plant personnel, the Operations Management software can improve work efficiency.
Human factors are often at fault for the emergency shutdowns and other issues that impact operational efficiency at plants. In many cases, the issuance of work instructions, the monitoring of progress, and the like are done verbally or with written documents, and the absence of a digital record can lead to a number of problems. For example, this can make it impossible to check work progress in real time, it can take a long time to collect necessary information, errors can be made when adding information to shift handover reports, and it can be difficult to locate and retrieve records on past operations. Safety can also be compromised by issues such as the failure to report near misses and incidents and take appropriate countermeasures, and misunderstandings between field workers and control room operators. In markets all over the world, there is a growing awareness of the need for operations management solutions that can enhance efficiency and safety and ensure business continuity and the retention of knowledge.
The Operations Management software that Yokogawa has developed digitizes and standardizes a wide variety of information for sharing among plant operators and managers. This can range from information on anything unusual noted in plant operations to the status of a task or the workflow for a specific operation. This software helps to improve reliability and safety by ensuring that plant personnel have the information they need to carry out their work correctly, and it also helps to improve operational efficiency. While supporting safe and secure operation management, this solution can record event actions and work carried out based on work instructions, and enables the retrieval and use of information that represents the knowledge and know-how of skilled operators.
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