{"id":473,"date":"2015-10-14T09:28:27","date_gmt":"2015-10-14T14:28:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.repete.com\/?p=473"},"modified":"2015-10-14T09:28:27","modified_gmt":"2015-10-14T14:28:27","slug":"the-final-frontier","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.repete.com\/thai\/2015\/10\/14\/the-final-frontier\/","title":{"rendered":"Intelligent Automation – The Final Frontier"},"content":{"rendered":"

Intelligent automation \u2013 the final frontier.<\/strong>
\nPeople make mistakes. But when people in feed mills make mistakes, the results are always costly. It\u2019s just a matter of degree.
\nAs feed mills move toward an ever-higher level of automation, people are being taken out of the equation. Facilities have begun operating with almost no direct labor, aside from people who maintain equipment and manage through uncommon situations that may arise.
\nThose people aren\u2019t in the mill monitoring equipment. They\u2019ve shut off the lights and left, returning only if needed to fix equipment or perform normal maintenance.
\nThis is \u201clights-out\u201d automation, the final frontier in process automation.
\nLights-out is automation to the fullest possible level. When you\u2019re at lights out, your plant floor operates on its own, maintaining the established level of product quality and preventing product waste. No one has to hover over equipment, watching for problems that might arise. Although lights-out mills are rare today, good ones exist.
\nThe ultimate goals of a workerless plant floor are feed safety and the ability to immediately substantiate product integrity. In short: provable safety. It\u2019s what mills, their customers and the federal government all want. \u00a0The need for greater safety has already given the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) more teeth<\/a>.
\nImagine having the capability to quickly prove to a customer that what you supplied was of the utmost integrity and quality. The ability to pull a report in a few minutes and head off liability at the pass can prevent lawsuits.
\nToday\u2019s common, fully automated mill still places a lot of responsibility on equipment operators. Operators have to know the state their process areas at any given moment. At a mixing station, for example, there may be six or eight batches in flight amounting to several tons of material. In this scenario, if the operator doesn\u2019t know the state of all processes when a problem occurs, the run usually gets aborted. Material gets scrapped. A substantial amount time and money are lost.
\nLights-out shifts the shifts knowledge from the operator to the system. In doing so, it prevents people from making mistakes and adds tremendous advantages:<\/p>\n