The following is a conversation with Elinor Price, product marketing manager, Honeywell Connected Plant. Honeywell Connected Plant is the company's primary IIoT solution that turns data into insights to make plants and businesses run better. "Our approach involves connecting asset data, process data, and process design with connected productivity tools for people. This allows us to replicate and augment the expertise of the most-experienced operators, maintenance personnel and plant managers. Combining all of this allows people tasked with running plants to understand where the process is going in the next few hours, days or weeks.  We do this by combining process data with analytics and thus maximizing asset performance and reliability. We also link our customers with a growing ecosystem of equipment OEMs to leverage their asset domain experience and improve operational decision making," Price said. Some of the Honeywell IIoT solutions implemented have enabled customers around the world to improve process reliability by capturing and analyzing data, and then identifying the warning signs of potential issues – predicting when process adjustment and equipment maintenance are needed, and preemptively servicing installed assets before problems arise. Ultimately, Honeywell Connected Plant customers can use these insights to produce higher yield, make workers more effective and run plants more efficiently. Some examples of customers using IIoT Solutions from Honeywell are:

• An offshore oil and gas customer in the Gulf of Mexico, who now monitors all assets, connecting their people with real-time data using predictive analytics for problem diagnosis. The result is increased production efficiency and decreased downtime and operational costs, delivering a savings of $30 million/year.
• A South American mining customer, who now optimizes operations in real time by connecting multiple plants to each other and their mine has yielded improved reliability and reduced energy usage and shutdowns, delivering savings of $2 million/day.
• An Indian refining customer who now connects data from over 18 different systems for better analytics and accurate KPIs has improved optimization across the enterprise, delivering a savings of $4 million per site/year.

"Industrial organizations seek ‘digital intelligence’ to manage and operate hundreds or thousands of assets from a single site or across an enterprise to address critical operating demands. They need effective tools to transform process data into real-time information regarding process performance, equipment health, energy consumption and emissions monitoring," Price said. Price believes Cloud and IIoT solutions will make more technology and capabilities available at a lower price-point of entry and will remove a lot of the IT infrastructure support requirements that have often hampered the adoption of technology for many industry segments like the gear industry. "The level of collaboration will increase across enterprises and the ability to leverage subject matter experts (SMEs) more broadly are all elements that will provide significant ROI benefits to businesses that embrace these solutions," she added. Cloud computing can extend and improve collaboration across the enterprise. Additionally, it enables manufacturers to collect and analyze more data than possible today. New advanced analytics tools provide asset and operational insight, expert knowledge and predicative analytics that help optimize the operation of assets and mitigate risk. Honeywell is continually investing in IIoT solutions to enable its customers to better connect people, assets and processes to digitally transform their business. By doing this, assets become more reliable; new ways are found to operate with greater efficiency; higher yields can be achieved; and you can optimize performance across your enterprise. "As a software industrial company, we view ourselves as the leader in the IIoT space. We believe Honeywell Connected Plant provides our customers a unique advantage. We can offer more than 100 years of experience designing processes used in plants and more than 40 years of experience designing software supporting downstream industries. In addition, we have a broad cyber security expertise and IIoT technologies that allow operations to run securely. No one else has this type of combined expertise, and we pair it with advanced analytics to make it work harder for our customers," Price said. The result of these technological improvements in the future will be evident in the increased collaboration between humans and machines, Price added. "There will be more adoption and incorporation of Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Intelligence (MI) that will result in unprecedented levels of productivity." (https://www.honeywellprocess.com)