Presentation: Improving Data Usability

Sherwin Alumina Company is an alumina refinery located in Gregory, Texas.  Our PI System was installed in 2010. The motivation behind its development was to provide an efficient historian and process monitoring tool for all plant personnel.  This presentation will explain how various PI System tools have been used in the last 3 years. Technologies used include Microsoft Access, PI ProcessBook, PI AF, Microsoft SQL/OLEDB, PI Performance Equations, and PI ACE.  The topics covered will include establishing a plant wide managed PI ProcessBook application, using the PI System to bring value to process areas with little instrumentation, and automatically emailing a morning report.   

Plant Wide Application:  SherwinMain, our plant wide PI ProcessBook document, is available to all plant personnel. The document is presented in such a way that every process area of the plant has its own section.  Benefits include granting the ability to observe processes to those who lack access to our Distributed Control System.  The SherwinMain Application also allows operations personnel to view other process areas’ statuses and performance that may affect their own areas of responsibility. 

Little Instrumentation, huge visibility:  Paper-based status updates turned in once per shift are now a vast information source!   

• Our filter press floor has little to no instrumentation, yet our PI ProcessBook display provides us with near real time essential status information for the area.  The display uses PI AF, PI Performance Equations, and our custom developed manual entry add-in to PI ProcessBook.   
• Our bauxite storage buildings shelter different types of bauxite used in our process.  It is important to know where each type of bauxite is in the building and how much is in each location.  Operations performs a daily building walk-through and then updates a Microsoft Access form.  Technologies used in this process are PI ProcessBook, PI AF, and Microsoft Access.   

Daily Automated Report: 

All levels of plant management rely on an automatically generated and emailed process overview report to give them a snapshot of plant performance for the prior day.  The report relies on calculations in PI AF and is triggered and distributed using a Microsoft SQL job.