Condition Based Monitoring Dashboard with, by, and for Engineers
Over the past year, Sitech Asset Health Center (SAHC) has been working on a new Condition Based Monitoring dashboard to help provide actionable insights into the process. What makes this dashboard unique is the fact that it has been built entirely on the basis of the preferences and requirements of the end user – the engineer. Rowen Forman is Data and Business Analyst at Sitech Asset Health Center and is responsible for the user experience and visualization of the data in the dashboard. Following a series of interviews, brainstorming sessions, and rounds of tests with engineers, he has gained valuable insights to ensure that the dashboard is developed with a particular focus on the chemical industry.
What information do engineers deem important? What information is not important? And how do they want to get hold of that information? To understand end users properly, it’s important to know how they think. Rowen explains, “We went through our current clients and approached several engineers who we then involved in the entire development process. We started by looking at the dashboards that engineers currently use. We then conducted interviews and brainstorming sessions to analyze the dashboards. With clear, short sprints, we then succeeded in optimizing them.”
“It quickly became obvious that there isn’t a ‘one-size-fits-all solution”
SAHC monitoring services
New Insights for Appropriate Features
The interviews and sessions with engineers provided a greater understanding. Rowen continues, “It quickly became obvious that there isn’t a ‘one-size-fits-all solution’ and that every engineer is on the look-out for different information. Where an asset engineer is mainly looking for asset-specific information, a reliability engineer looks at plant-wide information. We brought all of these different needs into our dashboard by adding several adaptive features.”
“Our new dashboard is a unique product tailored to the chemical industry”
“We also discovered that engineers interpret data in a different way to data scientists. While a data scientist pays attention only to the likelihood of certain values, an engineer looks at whether the values can be linked to the actual process in the plant. As such, data visualization needs to be more than just the communication of differences between the data points. For engineers, the added value is in the context of the chemical process itself. We ensure that that context is offered up in the dashboard in a way that is insightful.”
A Continuous Process of Improvement
Collaboration with the engineers has not come to a halt. “It’s a continuous process of analysis, testing, and improvement,” Rowen continues. “In addition, we are also saving the engineering knowledge that we have acquired so that we always have earlier feedback and conclusions if we need them. This dashboard is a unique product for the chemical industry, but as good as it is, it can always be improved. We continue to develop and gather knowledge to make the dashboard smarter, more efficient, and more intuitive.”
