Industrial Control System Health and Reliability: Honeywell’s intelligent automation service helps customers embrace the new normal

With industrial organizations continuing to adapt to manufacturing challenges shaped by today’s business uncertainties as they seek to get their operations back online, they need to analyze critical data and leverage collective intelligence to ensure the health and reliability of their Industrial Control System (ICS). The speed at which they can do so translates into potential cost savings and increased profitability. 

Company executives, plant managers and control engineers must be able to:

• Understand and improve operational effectiveness and risk profiles
• Leverage benefits from systems, applications and people
• Focus efforts on core competencies by deploying suitably skilled resources
• Ensure the health, security and stability of control assets

For manufacturing companies, plants, profits and people are at risk when operational insights are limited. Workforce reductions, resource constraints and cost pressures all have an impact on efficiency and productivity in an increasingly competitive environment.

The sheer volume of data today, combined with a lack of internal resources, can overwhelm plant operating companies as they try to identify production problems and compliance risks and act on optimization opportunities. In addition, industrial maintenance strategies require the availability of a proven pool of skilled human resources.

The open architecture of the modern ICS has also led to greater complexity than in the past. This situation, in turn, places additional demands on system service and support capabilities.

Are you able to adapt to change?

No matter the industry, change is inevitable. But industrial manufacturers, in particular, are under pressure to adopt and implement new technologies and solutions that produce greater efficiency, productivity and safety in today’s uncertain times.

What if your operations could self-evolve to keep ahead of disruption? This is about going beyond improvements to efficiency – it’s about enabling the ability to adapt to change.

By being open minded and innovative, industrial leaders are using data and advanced tools to rapidly adapt. More than just a trend, this “new normal” will have long-standing, dramatic effects on the future of business and the world.

A new type of intelligent plant automation service offers a holistic ICS support solution utilizing a remote connection and/or on-premises data collection, predictive and diagnostic tools, and global resource centers. It enables owners-operators to visualize the state of their control system health and compliance, and then act upon expert recommendations.

The first service program of its kind

Honeywell Enabled Services, powered by Honeywell Forge, is the first end-to-end service program of its kind in the industrial automation industry. This proactive support solution enables industrial organizations to focus on what they do best – running plant processes – without worrying about ongoing control system maintenance and support.

Experience has shown that a comprehensive service and support program ensuring plant assets are properly managed and maintained can have an enormous impact on productivity and profits.

Honeywell Enables Services is intended to help customers drive sustained business operations, whether that’s in a pandemic, natural disaster or other challenging situation. The subscription-based program was developed to meet a number of key operational objectives:

• Augment current internal resources and increase their efficacy
• Enable better and more focused control system maintenance and support
• Capture and transform system data into actionable insights to help save money

Honeywell Enabled Services assists ICS users in dealing with increasing system complexity, an aging industrial workforce and the constraints imposed on plant operations by the global pandemic. The integrated service program provides intelligent visualization recommendations so customers can assess, manage and optimize their automation assets. They can leverage our best-in-class remote support capabilities and deep process industry domain expertise. In case problems arise, Honeywell’s experts can rapidly analyze the situation and make fast recommendations to solve the issues and be on-site only if needed.

Act upon proven, expert insights

Honeywell Enabled Services software assesses assets across the enterprise, collecting real-time performance data and managing and prioritizing maintenance with expert insights and best practices to enable smarter decision-making and increase the uptime of critical plant operations.

The Enabled Services program can also help to improve system security compliance by identifying vulnerabilities and implementing effective protective measures.

Honeywell provides two levels of service to assist customers with different and/or unique system support requirements. It addresses system health, performance, security compliance, software maintenance and support, executing maintenance tasks, and system lifecycle management.

With this service and support solution, plant owners can reduce costs for correcting operating problems while taking a structured, predictive approach to maintenance expenditures and optimization opportunities to realize a higher value from contracted support.

Deal with new operational realities

With an eye on new operational realities in a post-pandemic environment, many industrial companies are deploying remote solutions beyond the four walls of their manufacturing facilities, addressing challenges related to asset availability at production facilities, as well as maintaining an adequate on-site workforce for engineering, operations and maintenance.

One area with great potential is the adoption of an operating model that blends physical operations with more remote support service delivery.

Enabled Services employs Honeywell Forge-powered dashboards to provide control system health and performance information in an intuitive and consistent way. The dashboards can be used to monitor applications, system performance and capacity utilization—on a remote basis if needed—to deliver early warnings and notifications of potential issues and provide insights to identify potential problems and resolutions before they manifest.

Enabled Services also monitors and offers guidance on system and network security and Human-Machine Interfaces (HMIs), so necessary action can address non-compliance to avoid potential downtime and connectivity or security incidents. In addition, the services provide remote access to software upgrades and patches, incident support and troubleshooting.

This overall approach is superior to ad-hoc maintenance solution offerings, home grown solutions that may compromise migration readiness, and/or delaying maintenance until equipment is compromised.

See important bottom-line benefits

Honeywell’s Enabled Services solution can deliver increased value by reducing the number of incidents per year with a net decrease in total cost of ownership. These capabilities not only help improve system health, performance and compliance, but also allow customers to redirect existing, high-skill resources to work on system improvements and core business activities.

Honeywell is ready to help your operations meet today’s changing productivity, efficiency, compliance and safety targets so you can move forward with confidence knowing that you can adapt to whatever the future may bring.

Learn more about an intelligent approach to ICS service and support.