Atime-in-state metric (TISM) enables continuous evaluation of process and equipment condition against an ideal condition or baseline. TISM provides early warning of deteriorating operating and equipment conditions that may impact operational efficiency, says operational risk management company IME Solutions owner Dr Kobus van der Merwe.

Defining the desired or ideal process conditions and equating real-time process conditions with operational performance is the basis of the TISM.

The time-in-state management programme incorporates knowledge and understanding of the process and requires detailed input from process engineers, plant operators and plant managers. The ideal state is derived by taking fundamental knowledge and experience of engi- neers, operators and managers into account.

“The objective of TISM is to enable companies to perform real-time process performance monitoring and use this information proactively to manage operating conditions and increase the time-in-ideal-state.”

This metric is an enhancement to the more general overall equipment efficiency (OEE) metric commonly used in industry, but which is a lagging indicator of performance, he says.

TISM is more efficient for managing the performance of continuous processes compared with OEE because it enables proactive manage- ment of conditions, Van der Merwe adds.

IME Solutions and industrial technology company Bytes Systems Integration collaborated and developed a TISM industrial performance tool that companies can use, says Bytes Systems Integration process management and control divisional manager Gerhard Greeff.

“Applying TISM delivers a common perform- ance measurement for all the facets of a business, enabling a plant manager to determine how long the whole plant functioned in an ideal state or a process engineer to report on how long a process or processes operated in an ideal state,” says Van der Merwe.

“It is common for a misalignment to exist between managers and operational staff, mainly based on how each measures performance. A manager may ask what the profitability of a process is, while an operator will know the performance of the process or machines for which he or she is responsible, but not the effect on profitability. TISM measurement enables both to use the same metric to determine optimum process efficiency and profitability, as the relation of efficiency to profitability will be determined during implementation,” he explains.

IME Solutions and Bytes Systems Integration offer consulting services to industry to help them determine the percentage time that production processes and equipment remain in ideal state, which is a significant and worthwhile exercise, says Greeff.

“Such an assessment provides clients with a reliable quantification of locked-in or latent process capacity and capability,” he highlights.

It is common to find processing plants that operate in ideal state for less that 20% of the time. In other words, plants operate for 80% of the time inefficiently or suboptimally. The TISM management programme enables plants to increase the time that the process operates in ideal state.

Bytes Systems Integration has designed industrial software, based on the concept of time-in-state performance management and the software can be used in any industrial technology platform, notes Greeff.

“The goal is to enable industry to monitor performance in real-time and take control of and improve upon their performance. Common interpretation of process conditions will enable common action, defined by a common understanding of the issues at stake, enabling companies to fulfil performance-improvement actions,” concludes Greeff.