The “connected plant,” with its promises of smart equipment sharing data and allowing manufacturers to make smarter business decisions, can only be a reality if equipment and its sensors are properly set up and connected successfully to the plant’s network.
Commissioning and configuring instruments and valves typically is one of the final, critical tasks before a plant can be formally started up. Completion of these tasks winds up being what stands between a new production facility and actual production of its first barrels of oil, batches of medicine, etc. Accurate and timely configuration and commissioning, then, is critical.
However, commissioning and configuring new devices has long been a hassle for industrial manufacturers. Manually entering device data and setting operational parameters is tedious and time-consuming: Consider that a single transmitter can have dozens of parameters to configure.
And while low-complexity devices might require as little as 10 minutes to commission and configure, the process for a more-complex asset can easily stretch to an hour or more. Validating that these tasks have been done correctly adds even more time (and thus cost) to the process.
