Seeq Solves Your Process Engineering Horror Stories
From haunted houses to Halloween costumes designed to spook trick-or-treaters of all ages, the fall season ushers in fun and frightening activities to enjoy. But for process engineers, horror stories aren’t limited to just one season.
Without the right digital solutions, process engineers experience the horrors of wrangling data all year long, sometimes daily. We’ve rounded up four stories from process engineers across industries that are certain to give you nightmares – and we’ll share how they leveraged Seeq to solve them.
1. Process Parameter Panic
A process engineer at a super major oil and gas company was using spreadsheets to monitor critical equipment, resulting in hundreds to thousands of old-fashioned, spreadsheet-based charts. When processing extensive time series data, the spreadsheet program would load slowly and often crash. Monitoring that many charts for critical process parameters made it challenging to work efficiently, increasing the likelihood of missing crucial excursions – an expensive lesson!
In Seeq, the engineer created a treemap to monitor plant performance, leveraging an asset structure to organize and streamline their equipment and the critical parameters. They can now focus on fewer treemaps instead of hundreds of charts, making monitoring more systematic. At a glance, the process engineer can quickly identify the top issues – what took hours using spreadsheets now takes minutes. This streamlined the engineer’s workflow and reduced the likelihood of missing critical process parameters.
2. The Terrifying Timesink
As a mechanical engineer in the oil and gas industry, the ability to monitor unit processes that impact equipment health is critical for proactive maintenance. Without an advanced analytics solution, an engineer used Excel Add-ons to perform monthly data pulls, which required remote access, across more than eight spreadsheet workbooks and then manually analyzed the data for their corrosion equipment strategies. This data pull, with subsequent manual data cleansing, filtering, calculating, and creating visuals would take more than four hours each month and left room for human error through each step in the process. The final output was a stoplight chart in PowerPoint where the various parameters were represented in red, yellow, or green to advise the business on equipment health and risk-based strategy updates.
After talking with some of their team members that were already using Seeq, the engineer’s mechanical integrity team made the switch from the original manual process in Excel and Powerpoint over to Seeq Workbench and Organizer. By using the same tags in Seeq that were pulling data into Excel, they could efficiently build the same monitoring parameters and calculations in Workbench and then combine the stoplight charts into an Organizer dashboard. Seeq enabled the team to do more robust data analysis by using Capsules and Formulas to better drill down into time periods of interest. Now, each month, the Organizer dashboard runs and automatically updates the stoplight chart report that used to take an engineer hours to complete.
3. Manual Manipulation Mayhem
One process engineer at a pharmaceutical company was tasked with merging data from two different systems (manufacturing data and quality lab data) with varying timestamps and diving into the realm of VBA macros where errors are likely to occur. Even when using functions like MROUND and VLOOKUP, these large datasets require relentless data manipulation before any meaningful insight can be found. When attempting to decipher patterns and identify golden batches in the data using finite difference methods to approximate derivatives, the datasets can be overwhelming and lead to human error, particularly when addressing nested IF-THEN statements.
With Seeq, the hours of manual data manipulation required to accomplish these tasks now take only a few clicks. By connecting directly to the full spectrum of time series data sources, Seeq retains existing databases as the source of truth, and timestamp alignment is handled automatically at the connector level, eliminating the most tedious data preparation steps. With built-in, advanced visualization capabilities, Seeq empowered the process engineer to identify time periods of interest, detect patterns, and optimize batch processing in the data in minutes.
4. Knowledge Share Nightmare
A process engineer at a chemical company took on a new responsibility for a high-volume process and, along with that, inherited a spreadsheet. An inherited spreadsheet is an engineer’s worst nightmare – imagine a complex web of input variables, an overwhelming array of trace dependency arrows, and the occasional intentional circular reference. Deciphering this spreadsheet was painstaking to impossible – What were the assumptions? What are these constants for? Is this formula broken? She abandoned the original spreadsheet and created her own – a task that took weeks to months to perfect.
When the process engineer started using Seeq and discovered the Journal feature, it clicked – they could make knowledge transfer so much easier for the next engineer. By creating calculations in Seeq and using the Journal in Workbench to document the steps and assumptions, the next engineer wouldn’t need to struggle through the calculations (or recreate their own), and the knowledge share process could be much smoother and more complete.
Seeq is the solution
Fortunately for these process engineers, advanced analytics solutions have risen to the data access, analysis, and collaboration challenges, enabling them to eliminate horror stories from their everyday work.
Manufacturing organizations can leverage Seeq to connect disparate data sources, immediately alleviating the challenges of live data connectivity. Seeq provides simplified data cleansing tools and contextualization, including time stamp alignment, empowering SMEs to quickly derive meaningful and reliable insights across all available data. Equipped with live data connections, SMEs can apply their analyses to near-real-time data.
By removing these data access barriers, SMEs can leverage Seeq’s purpose-built, point-and-click interface for descriptive, diagnostic, predictive, and prescriptive analytics to improve performance based on transformational data insights. These tools incorporate visualization into the data analysis build-up process, empowering SMEs to immediately visualize the impact of their data analysis, identify missteps and successes in real time, and iterate and innovate faster.
Seeq also enables organizations to maximize the effectiveness of SMEs, who may work from different sites or countries, to create insights by enabling streamlined collaboration, knowledge capture, and reporting.
Learn more about how Seeq enables organizations to avoid their data wrangling nightmares by viewing the customer success stories shared at Conneqt 2023. Visit the recap page to view all sessions.
And if you are ready to discuss how Seeq can improve your operations, please contact us to speak with one of our industry experts and schedule a demo today.