Engineering Magazine – June 2019

32 JUNE 2019 ENGINEERING

Unlocking the Value of

SCADA and HMI

As the manufacturing climate races to explore the value of the Industrial

Internet of Things (IIoT), reliable data collection is increasingly important

says John Fryer

Performance monitoring is essential

to keeping industrial automation

environments running efficiently and

maintaining a business’s competitive

edge. To address this need,

manufacturing operations rely on

modern Supervisory Control and

Data Acquisition (SCADA) and Human

Machine Interface (HMI) systems for

a variety of functions that are critical

to increasing efficiency. No longer are

SCADA and HMI confined to control

room applications, or specific machines

on a plant floor, but they are increasingly

deployed in edge applications in

a whole variety of production

environments. These new applications

enable plant personnel to quickly and

accurately make decisions regarding

product quality, production rates, and

even head off safety and regulatory and

compliance issues before they become

serious events. In other words, modern

SCADA and HMI systems are essential

tools that go way beyond traditional

control loop applications. The data

they collect, process and display is

increasingly an important element for

historians and emerging analytics and

IIoT applications.

For this reason, when key SCADA

and HMI systems fail, it can significantly

impact a manufacturer’s bottom line. In

fact, the failure of SCADA and HMI can

functionally stop plant data collection,

stranding teams without predictive

maintenance data, knowledge of asset

performance, and the ability to detect

data abnormalities that signal alarming

situations like equipment failure.

Essentially, when SCADA and HMI

servers fail, manufacturers fly blind.

They also open themselves to additional

risk of failing compliance audits through

SCADA

John Fryer