Early projects focussed, on immediate high impact operational challenges, permit achieving visible savings to demonstrate tangible benefits of using the technology. This is key for gaining management and workforce commitment.
In our experience with several projects we have found many chronic problems, whose Systemic Root Causes are a mix of design legacy errors and operation practices. These created severe plant instability and pronounced final product quality variability.
Under these circumstances, it does not make much sense to embark upfront on predictions of failure or process deviations. It is a more attractive proposal to strive to eliminate or mitigate failure occurrence. Once improving plant stability, then it is the right time to move onto predictive and or prescriptive analytics.
While working on these solutions sound understanding of the degradation mechanisms, for the problems under analysis, is achieved. This information reveals many required elements of a Digital Transformation route map; elements such as what data is available but need digitalization, what data is not available and might need new sensors for acquisition, and requirements for data integration.
This is high value front engineering information that permits proper planning and funding scheduling of a digitalization project.