The increased use of plant automation to meet production goals has created an “addiction” to PLC and control systems.
These devices and their applications are expensive to develop but vital to plant operation: ultimately they are seen by most companies as corporate assets. AND the task of plant management and the company to ensure that adequate safety measures are in place to protect and manage these technologies, facilitating business continuity and continuous improvement.
This White Paper examines the origins and types of variations and changes that occur within production processes, providing a simple guide to the approaches needed to safeguard automation systems through the effective use of a Change Management System (CMS).
Change management can be defined as the complete set of processes employed to ensure that changes are implemented in a visible, controlled and orderly way: in the field of plant automation it focuses on the control systems that operate production equipment .
Systems and Change Management System (CMS) platforms have matured in the last 20 years response to developments in plant floor technologies and capacity (and complexity) ever-growing number of control devices and software: how can we therefore monitor and manage variations and versioning of this new panorama?
THE MANAGEMENT OF CHANGE ON THE PLANT
A change management system in the field of industrial automation is a centralized system that manages changes to the logics of PLC, CNC, HMI, PC control systems, robots, drives and general automation programs.
Even the smallest of plants will have a few hundred applications that should be managed, while large plants will have several thousand. Over the life of a plant, the investment in the development and maintenance of these hardware and software solutions alone represents a significant expense that should be preserved and optimized.
To do this a CMS should have the following characteristics:
- An archive of previous revisions of programs (application backups)
- The ability to detect changes (change management control)
- Tools to document changes and make them visible to users (change visualization and management)
- A historical record of who made the change, when and where it was made from (structured variation archive)
- Secure access for users and workstations (account management and user privileges)
- Procedures for recovering from hardware and software failures (disaster recovery)
- Functionality for controlling editor operations mapped to user permission (authorization management)
- Change Notifications
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