Three Major Challenges faced in Installing HMI for Industrial Units

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Control and operation engineers now look forward to easy and convenient access to the machinery they work on. The thought of touchscreen capabilities to control a heavy duty machinery is not a far sighted thought. With the proliferation of connected devices in the industrial sphere, engineers have the ease to get analytics, intermediate data and process control on a control device which can either be their mobile phones or laptops.

It is the HMI system that works as the bridge between machine operators and the system to manage and control operations. Some versions of HMI software also translate data from industrial control systems into human-readable visual representations of the systems. There are a several other benefits that the system offers and further development is set to increase the advantages of the system. However, any company that is transforming to a digital and automated space faces challenges in term of setting up this technology and bringing people onboard. Following are some of the challenges that one might come across:

• Security Issues due to Remote Operations and Distance: As the technology progresses, it lends the people a hand to work from remote places. On one end it allows the business to have talented resources from any corner of the world, but it also allows them to access critical data and company insights from an unsecured network as well.
• Data Analysis and Transfer: When the vast set of machines operated through Industrial internet of things (IIOT) collects data using the SCADA system, the amount of data collected is huge. To compute the large set of data, it is important that an efficient system is in place. The one which is highly trusted and custom made as per the industry’s requirements in one by Schneider Electric India. The company offers efficient HMI system that can be integrated with any machinery. The combination of SCADA and HMI Software bring out the cumulative data that can be easily interpreted.
• Staffing Issues: As the industrial equipment changes, the need of having people versed with the new technology is also required. This means that it is essential to hire people who can efficiently understand the analytical data and process the information produced by HMI Software. The other way to go about it is to train the existing employees and make them versed with the functioning of the modern IoT driven system.

Using a mix of different technologies can be challenging initially however, it helps the people to differentiate functions, increase machine and operator usability, and gives a better control of overall production costs incurred to the business. Furthermore, the flexibility of having modern day technology fitted in the plant’s operation grants them competitive advantage to the customer. In the end, the consolidated touch control panels have overpowered human calculations and reduced the risk of faulty analytics.

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