You’ll soon be celebrating your control system’s 30-year anniversary, and it’s been, for the most part, a smooth ride. There might have been a situation when dozens of alarms showed up on the shift operator’s supervisory HMI—and you had to call in your maintenance and engineering staff at 3 a.m. only to find a defective sensor, stuck valve and an overheated motor.
Or once, when trying to balance year-end equations, missing ingredients and missing product couldn’t be accounted for, and the books showed many more dollars spent on ingredients that couldn’t be recouped in product. Quality assurance kept finding batches were a little off, but your control system didn’t detect any anomalies.