Plant audits are crucial evaluations of work that's performed. Every industrial system, no matter what type, should be audited for how well it operates. You should be able to look at any process, plus the equipment that makes it happen, the controls over the systems, and see where there are inefficiencies or better ways to do the job. The goal is to get everything running optimally, from the top down, to find productivity and get a reduction in costs.
The Role of Control System Auditing
A control system audit is a crucial process of checking the "PLC" (Programmable Logic Controllers), "DCS" (Distributed Control Systems) and "SCADA" (Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition) systems
This process identifies inefficiencies or risks and areas where improvements can be made. Once areas are evaluated for risk, a system can be put in that will improve the operation. This will ensure your plant is running at its best, is safe, and will ultimately save on costs.
Control system upgrades were performed due to results identified in the Auditing process. This is a real-world case scenario from site audits performed by Megatronic that reveal that individual process parts were not running to optimum because the PLC programming was not operating as intended. Due to the PLC fault, batching systems were overrunning 10 minutes long, using old hardware from the late 90s. A redesigned process reduced the program complexity and improved that part of the overall process by 20%. This Site Audit alone made significant measurements to the operations of the plant as a whole. Today, as a result, those plants are operating in overall greater efficiency and reliability.
Effective Plant Management Practices
Audit results are a vital plant management data source. This information allows managers to see where problems with compliance and inefficiency exist. The result is management's ability to decide to take specific action to improve (e.g., reduce costs or improve output in a manufacturing context, and get better at compliance in a compliance context).
Two important things that you can do to keep the plant running, and improve operational performance, are to hire a plant to optimize the management services (a.k.a. plant management and optimization) services company to do an audit of your plant, and to review plant management audit reports.
An effective business strategy is to do ongoing audits, to pick anywhere that plant optimization (i.e., more about plant optimization) can be done, anywhere that there is a problem to be solved. The audits provide feedback. A plant can adapt to new practical conditions, try to maintain better quality standards, or try to maintain different quality standards.
Plant audits and control system auditing are also the key to finding areas where you are deficient. They can bring to light all the nooks and crannies of your company where resources are just hemorrhaging. You can possibly stop the bleeding by taking your findings from those audits and then taking it to optimize.