6 Steps to Automate an Industrial Process
4 min read
Small to medium sized manufacturers understand the benefits of introducing process automation, but it’s tough to know how to get started with industrial automation. At the same time, 34% of companies are planning to introduce robotics and automation into their workflows, so those who don’t invest will soon find themselves at a competitive disadvantage.
Getting started with process automation doesn’t have to involve the most cutting-edge technologies or impractical capital expenditures. Above all, we need to keep it simple in order to overcome any obstacles that we’ll face along the way.
In this practical, hands-on guide, we’re going to break down process automation into its basic parts and show you that it’s easier to begin than you might have thought.
Step 1: Find an Automatable Process
In this initial discovery phase, our focus is narrowing down our scope to a few potential candidates. When picking a process that’s ripe for automation, we look at three key criteria:
Repeatability
Controllability
Value-add
Essentially, we can only automate a process if it happens in the same way every time and if we can design a control system that’s capable of repeating that routine. From there, we need to assess the impact of automation. This can take the form of increased productivity, improved safety, greater consistency, or less downtime.
If a process is tedious, dangerous, or inconsistent when done manually, it could be a perfect candidate for automation.
Step 2: Discretize Actions
Now that we’ve selected a process, we want to break it down into action units. We’ll explicate the process’s specification by constructing a sequence document, which clearly lays out every step we need for the process from beginning to end.
The sequence document can be as simple as the flowchart below.
Taking the initiative to document each process in your facility will make it significantly easier and faster to get quotes from your vendors and may even expose some inefficiencies in the process that can be tackled by automation.
Step 3: Build your Team, Budget, and Schedule
Now it’s time to assemble the team and flesh out the administrative backbone that’s going to get your project across the finish line. This preparation stage will make it or break it.
Start by assessing what talent and key stakeholders you need to involve, as well as how much of that you can source internally. Of course, every automation project requires mechanical, electrical, and software engineers, but we also want to bring in voices from across the company.
It’s crucial to understand how the automation will change your operations both downstream and upstream from the targeted process. This means that we need input from operators, quality control, design engineers, and upper management. Process automation often causes a ripple effect across the entire organization, so getting buy-in at this stage is key.
While your team will likely include both internally and externally sourced talent, we recommend picking your controls integrator first because they won’t push any hardware platform or vendor. If you haven’t already gotten Outlier involved, this is the time to give us a call.
Step 4: Select Controls Hardware
With all our preliminaries complete, we can now focus on technology. The first thing that we’ll consider is the system’s I/O (input/output) because knowing what data we’re going to collect, how we’re going to collect it, and how we’re going to use it will inform all our other decisions.
There’s a huge variety of sensors on the market, and when we add in the different protocols we use to network them and how they’ll fit into the system’s architecture, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. That’s why it’s so important to lean on your controls integrator’s expertise. We’ll help you pick the right tech to get the job done.
Of course, a big part of this is having a clear picture of where we are and where we’re going. We’ll need to gather all the mechanical and electrical documents for your current setup, but we also need to share the whole plan with the entire team so that we stay on the same page and know who needs to do what and when.
Lastly, don’t forget about IT infrastructure! For instance, will we store data on premises or on the cloud? How will technicians access that data from the plant floor? We’ll come back to that data later, but for now we need to remember to plan ahead to create a functional data ecosystem.
Step 5: Execute
If we’ve done everything right up to the point, execution will be the easiest part of the whole project. We’ll lean heavily on our plan as we integrate the new process automation, paying special attention to our schedule.
“A solid plan is a given, but don’t underestimate the importance of a schedule,” advises David McCarthy at Control Engineering. “The plan needs to include sufficient execution time for all project best practices… Often scheduling pressures may cause compression or elimination of best practices, which rarely ends with good results.”
Besides constructing a thoroughly detailed plan before we begin the installation process, our experience also tells us that communication is the key to staying on schedule and within budget. We recommend regular check-ins across all the involved teams to ensure a smooth execution.
Step 6: Analyze
With your new automation system in place, it’s time to create a feedback loop to quantize your return on investment, prove the value of automating the process, and look for opportunities to expand even further.
After all, you decided to do this project because you wanted to make money. So look at your overall equipment effectiveness (OEE), your cost reduction, and other key performance indicators (KPIs) that are impacted by the automation.
If you want to take this to the next level, many modern technologies that fall under the Industry 4.0 umbrella, such as the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), focus on optimizing this analysis to provide valuable insights about your factory’s inner workings. This data-centered approach is one reason we needed to dedicate time and effort to establishing our IT infrastructure in step 4.
Although the sky’s the limit with these advanced technologies, they’re far from necessary to get started. Yes, the future of manufacturing needs to be a part of your long-term growth plan, but it all starts with one small step.
Outlier is here to help you take that step. Get in touch with us today, and we’ll guide you through the entire process automation journey.