What is Innovation?

 

Innovation has been identified by organisations and governments as a key strategy for growth and sustainability in the turbulent and highly competitive global arena. Innovation has the potential to create competitive advantage by providing new technologies and products, new services, new ways of doing things, identifying new market opportunities or serving market segments that others have ignored.

Innovate or die has been the catch phrase of the 21^st Century. The modern organisation operates in an ether of discontinuous change and is faced with numerous influences that continually challenge its integrity and survival. These include the impact of rapid globalization, discontinuous change, increasing levels of competition, technological change, unstable economic conditions, transition from an industrial to knowledge-based society, diversified workforce and increasing complexity of the external environment.

But, what is innovation?

We still find it difficult to establish a clear definition for innovation that can be accepted widely. I have attended a number of “innovation” seminars and workshops recently and have found varying definitions and uses of the word “innovation”. Therefore, I wanted to present a clear definition of innovation through this blog, having worked in the innovation space for most of my working life. In simple terms:

Innovation is the practical application of new ideas and concepts into something of value in the market, in society or in an organisation, whether it is a new product, service, process or organisational system.

Value created through innovation can be in the form of different currencies, including: economic, social, community or environmental value. The traditional definition of innovation is based on technological innovation, that is, the development of a new product or process. Non-technological innovation relates to business operations such as changes in corporate strategy, business models, and organisational structures.

Activities such as creativity, ideation, invention and R&D are just subsets of the innovation process, however, we incorrectly interchange these terms with the word “innovation”.

From my previous knowledge and experience innovation can generally be separated into five types:

1.                   Product/Service Innovation – involves the development of new products and services, or the enhancement of existing products and services. This also includes product and service extensions. e.g. the Post-It note from 3M or the Paypal service

2.                   Process Innovation – the enhancement of new processes that improves the efficiency and effectiveness of an organisation or system e.g. implementing a knowledge management system to manage documents and information in a business

3.                   Marketing Innovation – related to the development of new channels to market, innovative promotional strategies, new pricing models and new marketing concepts e.g. a good example is eBay.com or Amazon.com

4.                   Organisational Innovation – the development of new strategies, structures and organisational systems across functional areas or the whole organisation e.g. moving from a bureaucratic organisational structure to a flexible self-directed project team structure

5.                   Business Model Innovation – related to organisational innovation, however, the focus is on reviewing the business model of an organisation and investigating alternative business models e.g. Wells Fargo is now a bank when previously the company was a stagecoach business.

Dr John Kapeleri

Energy Saving in a Brewing Plant

Introduction:

The Riveja's customer is one of the world largest brewing companies. On beer brewing plant located in Eastern Europe installed Delphin LogMessage data loggers in order to install an effective monitoring system and to find ways to reduce energy consumption.

Application / Problem:

The customer is operating a brewing plant and decided to install a Delphin LogMessage monitoring system to monitor energy consumption of CO2 for beer carbonizing process, steam flows, sewage flows and electrical energy consumption.

Proposal / Solution / Hardware:

For this installation a LogMesage 200 with 10 universal analog inputs and 11 digital and counter inputs was installed in a control cabinet of the production plant.

The analog inputs are interfaced with different steam, CO2 and sewage flow meters via 4-20 mA signals. The interface o fteh 2 ware flow meters from Siemens MAG 8000 was realised through the Modbus RTU interface. The Modbus registers where easily created on the 2 serial COM ports of LogMessage device. The customer is also using the internal calculation channels to calculate indicators from the live data. For example an integrator channel is used to totalize the energy and CO2 consumption of the brewing process.The functional design is shown below.

The process supervisor has a PS with a ProfiSignal Klicks software application to monitor live reading of the process. The mimic interface was easily developed with the ProfiSignal software and is shown below.

The process supervisor has a PS with a ProfiSignal Klicks software application to monitor live reading of the process. The mimic interface was easily developed with the ProfiSignal software and is shown below.

  

Summary of Benefits:

The advantages of the LogMessage installation are the following:

Ø       The LogMessage with universal analog and digital inputs can easily record all analog 4-20 mA signals and also the digital inputs from the energy meter with pulse output.

Ø       The LogMessage devices support many serial interface and the MAG 8000 flow meters could be easily interfaced via Modbus RTU protocol

Ø       The internal calculation channels for alarm monitoring and totalize give the operator live readings of key indicators

Ø       The internal logger memory with 1 GB capacity is storing the process data for backup functions. The live data is also archived in the DataServic Configurator online data base.

Ø       The ProfiSignal Klicks software also enable the operator to generate different reports and statistics of the process

PID Controller Economics

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Process Performance is not as good as you think

 PID controllers at lowest level

• PID controllers are the “workhorse” of Process Industry

• 90 % of the controllers are PID’s

• More than 30 % of PID’s operates in manual

• More than 30 % of loops increase short term variability

• About 25 % of loops use default settings

• About 30 % of loops have equipment problems

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How could the benefit generated:
 

Batch time reduction through increased throughput in a non saturated market

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•More stable operation (operator load)

•Less system load (lifetime)

•First step towards APC

APC not useful when PID’s are badly tuned

Some details about Riveja

Riveja specializes in test and measurement systems and equipments for industrial use. Our product range covers everything from transducer to the full size production tests solutions.

In addition to product sales we design and manufacture customized test and measurement systems. Our services include automation design, manufacturing and commissioning.

Riveja’s measurement solutions are mainly used in product development, research and maintenance. We design and manufacture special systems according to customers needs. Measuring systems can be based on the ready made hardware and software or it can be custom designed.

Riveja has a wide selection of devices from transducer to the high-end analyzers. In addition to hardware and software sales we built customized systems. Typical measurable values are temperature, vibration, pressure, rotation, force, torque, strain and noise. Systems are widely used in vehicle- and defense industry, universities, research institutes, electronics and in machine building applications.

Production machines and devices should work without unplanned interruptions. High usability of productive machinery assumes predictive maintenance measurement to avoid expensive device damages and manufacturing interruptions. Riveja has wide product range that includes transducers, portable measuring devices and permanently installed monitoring systems suitable for maintenance and safety.

Our basic business principle is customer satisfaction. We want to do our best to serve our customers and make sure that customer is satisfied with our products and services. We are committed to premium quality and agreed delivery times. By our work we want to show that we are trustworthy cooperation partner.

Advanced process control

Advanced Process Control (APC) is un-doubtedly the control philosophy of the future. However, currently about 95% of all controllers in the process industry are still of the PID-type, simply because they are so easy to implement in a DCS or PLC. Consequently, even if you have installed an APC system like TopMessage, it will continue to act on the plant via the underlying PID control loops. You therefore need to have your PID loops optimally tuned, which is where TopMessage and ProfiSignal comes in.

Applications of soft sensors

Quality Control is currently realized by online analyzers and regular lab analyses. Yet online analyzers are expensive, often not available, and costly in maintenance, while lab samples are time-consuming and are frequently taken at a 4-hour interval, which is too long for closed loop quality control. A better alternative is soft sensor technology, which allows you to estimate product quality parameters in real time, so that you can start controlling quality in closed loop. This technology gives the plant operator and the control system the possibility to react faster to disturbances and keep product quality in-spec.

Soft sensors give you an estimate of parameters (such as these below) every
second, and allow you to control them in real time:

• Polymer densities
• Polymer melt indexes
• Viscosity parameters
• Concentrations of products at the outlet of a reactor, distillation column or blender
• Color parameters
• Exhaust concentrations (NOx, CO2, dioxines, opacity, etc.)
• Very large flows (e.g. cooling water of a large power plant)
• Plant efficiency. 

Process Operation Analysis

Significant benefits can be unlocked by analysing process operations, constraints, bottlenecks and control loop configurations. Payback is of the order of 1 to 6 months.
We analyse process data from your operational plant and coupled with site visits and interviews, develop an in-depth understanding of process constraints, operational challenges and business requirements. We improve PID loop performance, identify process bottlenecks and implement the required improvements.
The activity is non-intrusive and requires only a small investment. Specific process problems can be addressed, and solutions proposed and deployed in a short time period.