How to Streamline Operating Best Practices

Would you accept to get operated by a surgeon who has read a procedure in a book few years ago, but didn’t have a clear procedure in mind before you went under the knife?

Probably not. Yet in many companies and plants, this is exactly what happens every day. Whether in startups, shutdowns, changes in operating scenarios or operating procedures, the impact of not following the defined best practices ranges from inefficiencies and non-compliance, to incidents and unplanned shutdowns. The dozens of operating manuals and procedures that company employees must read, get trained on, confirm that they understand, and follow are critical for the plant efficient operations. Having well-defined procedures is one thing, ensuring that they are effectively followed by all employees in all situations is another. To reach this objective, companies need to automate these procedures to ensure less chaos in daily operations and less disruptions when key experienced employees leave or are unavailable.

To move from traditional written procedures and check lists to automated operating best practices compliant with ISA 106, you can rely on KNet KWorkflow module. Automating procedures with KWorkflow allows you to:

• Get a better visibility of completed, ongoing, and next steps
• Increase safety and avoid non compliance
• Provide traceability for inspections and audits
• Ensure all steps are performed in the correct sequence
• Save time and efforts by smoothing the collaboration between the different teams
• Prevent human errors and speed up employees readiness to comply with the defined procedures

But what makes KWorkflow the best choice for best practices and procedures automation?

1. KWorkflow comes with a robust multi-features platform

KWorkflow benefits from an integrated robust framework called KnowledgeNet. This cutting edge platform allows you to:

• Digitize your operations with KnowledgeNet platform to jump on the bandwagon otherwise you will be getting woefully left behind.
• Extend your workflow based application to cover other advanced features such as diagnosis, prediction, data analytics, and rule based reasoning.
• Intuitively visualize and automatically report automated procedures insights whether using web dashboards, client applications, or via third party portals like SharePoint.
• Seamlessly integrate data in your workflow from multiple systems using industry standards such as OPC, ADO .Net, SOA, Modbus, and WCF.

2. KWorkflow is user friendly, easy to use, maintain, and update

• KWorkflow does not require programming skills and is based on an interactive graphical configuration environment where you can easily drag, drop, and connect ready-to-use blocks from a large toolbox of pre-defined blocks.
• KWorkflow is object-oriented and thus allow quick implementation of generic rules which are highly maintainable.
• KWorkflow helps you troubleshoot your application with graphical visualization of steps that are facing issues to be completed.

3. KWorkflow is flexible and scalable

• KWorkflow flexibility is achieved by ensuring that there are a number of execution paths through the workflow process in such a way that key decision making points are well represented. This allows the appropriate path to be selected on a per-instance basis to take account of the prevailing circumstances.
• KWorkflow is engineered to deal with small scale up to large scale operations. You can easily extend the application to include new operations, procedures, activities, users, departments, and so on.

Most operations can still be greatly optimized and automated to yield significant efficiencies and automating procedures with KWorkflow can be performed for different operations segments of company activities including production, maintenance, safety, inventory, quality etc. Automated procedures can also be defined as a sequence of tasks such as start-up, shutdown, transition modes, change management, corrective actions, and the routing rules that must be followed. In addition to the listed advantages of using KWorkflow, you can take advantage of the KNet platform features to define performance metrics that tells you how well your organization is performing by visualizing performance metrics such as on-going tasks, delays, profit loss, uptime, and throughput.

If you think that your industry is ripe for the adoption of KWorkflow, with many opportunities available to perform tasks consistently among the different departments and operations please contact us and we will be pleased to help you define the best solution for your company.