Zemen Radar

SCADA and Process monitoring are two buzz words that many business owners are aware of, but that are not always fully understood. SCADA stands for Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition. SCADA software is often used for process monitoring – that is tracking what is going on in your machine shop, plant, warehouse, or other areas of operation.
The value of process monitoring should not be under-estimated. SCADA software can tell you everything that is going on in your shop, at all times. If a device is overheating, or if there’s a backlog somewhere, you will be alerted. Often, process monitoring can tell you about a problem before it gets serious enough for the people on the shop floor to notice it. This can be invaluable, as it can allow you to stop using the defective equipment until it is repaired – potentially saving you from a more serious hardware failure and the lost time and repair costs that go with it.
One mistake that many companies make is to invest in SCADA equipment and process monitoring, and then ignore it. The assumption they make is that if the graph doesn’t flatline, or there are no alarms going off, then that means that there’s no problem. While you could use SCADA as a sophisticated early warning system, you’re missing out on a lot of extra benefits if that’s all you do.
Good SCADA equipment reveals more than just whether or not things are working. You can use process monitoring software to find out where the bottlenecks are in your processes. That knowledge can help you figure out what you need to invest in so that you can make your processes more efficient. It could be that one part of your plant is holding up everything else, and that you could double your productivity with just a small investment.
The system for process monitoring will include an HMI (Human Machine Interface). This condenses the information from all of the points within the system into something that can be understood quickly and easily. However, the information provided by the HMI is usually abstracted, and is only a snapshot of what is going on at that moment in time. If you want more information, and most people will if they are using the system effectively, then you will need to access it another way.
Modern SCADA systems are often linked up to a database, which can generate informative reports and charts. To make the most of your new system, you should review the information in the database regularly, and compare charts to look for gradual changes which could indicate that a fault is developing, or that there are areas where productivity could be improved.
You do not need to be a slave to your monitoring software, but you should learn how to use it and understand it as well as possible. For many companies, it is a big investment, so it would be a mistake to not make it pay for itself to the full extent of its abilities.