Unlock the full potential of your existing assets
Industry partners and asset owners are searching for innovative solutions for new challenges such as:
- A more carbon-constraint environment
- Changing feed stocks
- Increased social and regulatory pressure.
Adapting to these requirements, obligations, and challenges can no longer be done via large capital expenditure. To be competitive in global markets, industry is now looking at ways to bridge the gap between the capability and the capacity of their existing assets to maintain profitability and their license to operate.
Optimal performance is achieved when solutions and processes are driven towards their performance limits, and facilities that apply meaningful real-time metrics to their process control assets realize optimal performance. With this in mind, Advanced Process Control (APC) solutions are a perfect fit to address the growing list of challenges.
Applying control science to monitoring, modeling, and control technologies
Opportunity and feasibility studies
Understanding the value proposition of APC is the first step to improving performance. By conducting comprehensive data-driven studies, value is realized through increased throughput, operational consistency, energy and reagent savings, reduced product quality variability, reduced product loss, and enhanced overall plant safety.
Our control and process optimization expertise, combined with our rich knowledge of the process and business drivers, is overlayed with statistical analysis based on industry standards. This provides a risk-mitigated, data-driven business case that enables wise investment decisions.
Training, sustainment, and post-audit
Change is hard and this needs to be recognized from the onset of the project. This is why we ensure that the people who operate and maintain these solutions are front and center of the project.
We conduct comprehensive hands-on training, support, and coaching of the APC deployments, and we employ strategies to identify any training needs while providing top-tier post commissioning support. We approach our projects with an integrated mindset and take care to ensure end-users are satisfied and fully comfortable with the APC solution.
APC Readiness
APC improvements require a level of pre-assessment of the current state of instrumentation, regulatory control, data availability, and reliability.
Our APC experts conduct a methodological assessment of all the layers and identify actionable gaps to ensure APC deployments are effective and successful.
We work with our clients to develop scorecards for all the layers within an industrial system and provide actionable recommendations for improvements before APC can be implemented.
These include:
1. Key instrumentation audits and analysis (utilizing six sigma methods)
2. Regulatory control audits (tuning of controls, oscillation identifications)
3. Operational Technology (OT) network and data assessment.
APC and DCS interfacing and integration
APC and DCS/PLC are complicated systems that need to work together, and Hatch is one of the experts who can make them work well. We can connect APC to DCS/PLC, and we have a lot of experience working with different types of DCS/PLC systems. We can also customize the APC interface to fit your needs.
APC design and planning
Ensuring we fit the solution to the problem and not the problem to the solution allows for the correct design of applications with the correct APC technology. Our global reach and vast technical knowledge of various processes allows us to provide a best-in-class design solution for our clients.
APC planning and execution
APC implementations require due diligence and planning, as deployments occur on live systems. Rollout plans and change management, coupled with excellent project management, is crucial. Our expert’s capabilities include:
1. Rollout plans: internal and external resourcing, training, and change management
2. APC configuration (using all major technology providers)
3. APC simulation
4. APC to Distributed Control System (DCS)/ Programable Logical Controller (PLC) interface configuration
5. APC Human Machine Interface (HMI) configuration
6. Risk reviews
7. APC commissioning.
Hatch provides APC vendor agnostics solutions, giving us the tools to provide preferred technology based on our clients’ requirements.