The push for more sustainable operations around the globe has touched nearly every industry, and the life sciences are no exception. Manufacturing teams now need to carefully manage waste, energy use, water use, and emissions on top of all their existing responsibilities. Whether this responsibility falls on a massive organization or a small startup company, it creates headaches and complexity that distract teams from the lifesaving work they want and need to be doing.
Fortunately, as Emerson’s Kristel Biehler explains in her recent article in Pharma Manufacturing, navigating the complexity of sustainability can be improved with automation. Today’s most effective organizations are embracing a boundless automation vision for their data, built on seamlessly integrated technologies, to help them better monitor, manage, and maintain the assets they rely on so they can increase sustainability with far less additional overhead.
Small, essential improvements
It all starts with instrumentation. Nearly every organization has assets in the field that are not running at optimal performance, and because performance and sustainability are linked, carefully monitoring such assets is a great way to make appreciable sustainability enhancements. Kristel explains,
“Poorly performing assets, such as motors and pumps, can waste a lot of energy. Improving the visibility of underperforming or poorly performing assets is typically the easiest place to start making sustainability gains.”
So where does a team start improving the performance of its assets? By adding wired and wireless sensing devices. Sensors like Emerson’s Rosemount™ acoustic transmitters or the AMS Wireless Vibration Monitor can be installed quickly and easily on assets in the field to ensure they are operating at their best, not wasting energy or water, or leaking chemicals and greenhouse gases.
Taking it to the edge
So, what do you do when you have assets you need to monitor, but don’t have the trained data analysts necessary to collect that data, pore over it, and use it to form actionable insights? In most cases, the most effective solution is edge analytics. Modern edge analytics devices like the AMS Asset Monitor can be installed right at the asset by a plant’s own technicians and can collect vibration data as well as other conditional data such as temperature, pressure, and flow. As Kristel shares in her article, embedded analytics at the edge are perfect for organizations that want to improve sustainability but do not have a deep bench of analysts available on site,
“Wireless edge analytics devices collect data from a wide range of assets, and then apply embedded analytics right at the source to immediately alert personnel to problems and provide recommendations for remediation. The best solutions use specialized analytics technologies to easily identify the most common issues in assets, helping personnel of any experience level quickly isolate and solve problems.”
Bringing it all together
Adding additional sensors is a critical element of improving sustainability, but to improve the scalability of those solutions and achieve the maximum gains, most organizations are also implementing seamlessly integrated software to collect the data from instrumentation and make it as valuable and visible as possible.
“Whether an organization tackles sustainability all at once with a massive, top-down effort, or chooses to scale up point solutions to capture further insight and more evasive gains, eventually most will want to move their data into the cloud for access at the enterprise level. Doing so is far easier if the company has adopted a boundless automation strategy for data mobility across all its automation solutions. As the number of devices and systems that must be brought into the fold increases, so too does the complexity of connecting all those elements without creating a complex web of custom-engineered interfaces. Solutions designed with a boundless automation vision are built on open standards and seamless connectivity, so they interconnect natively with little to no engineering effort.”
Solutions like AspenTech’s Inmation™ and Emerson’s AMS Optics can help organizations standardize data and present it from a single pane of glass, as well as make it more easily accessible and consumable by a wide variety of cloud applications. These integrated applications help teams create seamless workflows, from data sensing, through early analysis, into deeper enterprise analytics, and even directly into issue resolution through direct connection to CMMS solutions. This simplicity of workflow helps life sciences teams ensure the most efficient, sustainable operations, while also freeing them to focus on the critical research, development, and manufacturing tasks that are their primary focus.
Kristel shares more information into ways automation can improve sustainability, including real-world examples from the life sciences industry in the full article. Head to Pharma Manufacturing to see ways automation can improve your plant or organization’s sustainability footprint.
