A-Plus
An Asset and Production Loss Utilisation System (A-Plus) for Production and Loss Accounting
A-Plus is a Loss Accounting system which helps complete the production accounting equation of Actual + Loss = Target, in particular the analysis of what contributes to the “Loss” part of production. It has three main areas of functionality: Reporting (charts, tables, etc), downtime allocation (data entry and related analysis and approval), and downtime detection (e.g. automatically detecting that an event has occurred by monitoring another system).
A-Plus is designed to collect and record information relating to the reduction in production capacity and performance of equipment, facilities or assets. It supports both manual creation of events by users and automatic detection of events method through the A-Plus Detection Engine.
Features and Benefits :
Event Management
- Event Wizard. Wizard-style interface for entering downtime events for greater usability, with room for user fields and equivalent downtime to be entered.
- User Fields. Custom categories that can be configured by an administrator, allocated to an event, and grouped/filtered in the enhanced reporting engine. Downtime can now be easily allocated to and reported on user fields such as Product Type, Secondary Cause, etc.
- Copy and paste function to break up/down event into smaller events, with different allocation value for accurate reporting.
- Create Unbound Events that have a start time but no end time, to track long-running downtime events.
- Equivalent Downtime. Loss (reduced rate) events can have an equivalent downtime specified for inclusion in reports with downtime (full stoppage) events, to give the loss event an equivalent downtime of 4 hours and retain the actual event time and downtime related to loss events. This avoids workarounds such as creating a 4 hour downtime event that ‘corresponds’ to the loss.
Event Screen
- Flexible and configurable filtering of event screen.
- Configurable setup of column display.
- Export to Excel, and if necessary, export event data and perform one-off detailed statistical analysis using tools such as Microsoft® Excel®.
Reporting
- Report Templates. Create reports by utilising event customised grouping/filtering reports based upon histogram, waterfall, pareto, pie, event list, and event spread templates. A data table can be viewed beneath the report.
- Dynamic Report Properties. Perform ‘drill down analysis’ by dynamically selecting properties for a report, including grouping and filtering to group by cause on pareto to determine primary downtime cause, change group-by to be equipment, and filter by that cause
.
Shift Support
- Shift Patterns. Supports same or different shift patterns per area of existing business structure.
- Shift Filtering. Enhanced filtering based upon shifts in event screen and event chart to support shift-based downtime approval workflow.
Downtime Allocation and Approval
- Area Security. Restrict areas operators can enter downtime against, to support user acceptance and interaction between areas.
- Default Area User Preference. Operators will see their default area when logging in.
Automatic Downtime Detection
- Customised detection. Detection engine plug-in customised detection of events from other production systems eg. Supply Chains
- Tag-Based downtime using Event Monitor. DCS tags can be monitored and trigger downtime events in A-Plus where downtime detection logic can be implemented and tested (e.g. with trends) side by side with the rest of the system
- Alarm Manager. Notifies A-Plus of alarms/state changes rather than requiring A-Plus to monitor all relevant external systems, making automation more versatile and support other publishers of downtime information such as Sentinel.
- Advanced Masking Rules. Hierarchy-based masking produces better model dependencies in production process, and improves accuracy of automatic detection.
- Dual reporting improved accuracy. Include/exclude events from production report but retain for maintenance reports.
A-Plus delivers the following value to an organisation:
- Provides business intelligence for production accounting and optimisation
- Flexible reporting and analysis
- Configurable approval workflow, facilitates step-by-step operator workflow.
- Downtime Detection allows for reduced operator workload with event automation.
- Improved accuracy with an approval workflow means nothing gets missed or overlooked by operators or supervisors.
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