The Long-Term Benefits of Optimizing Your Systems

Why should a company invest time and resources into optimizing their systems when the systems they currently use are working perfectly well?

It’s a question that many organizations face every day. Their legacy systems are doing the job they were designed to do while costing little to run. As a capital investment, management retains the view that all possible benefit must be gained from existing equipment before moving on to something new—especially if that new system is unproven within the company or industry as a whole.

Many of these legacy systems are operated by experienced employees who like the way the system works: they understand the processes, including all the quirks that come with using older technology. It’s comfortable and easy for them. Making a change thus becomes harder as it pushes against the culture of the company right down to the shop-floor level.

Benefits of Optimization

An optimized system is intelligent. By being able to monitor itself and send results back to an office located elsewhere, an intelligent system can be placed in remote, difficult-to-access locations that would usually be too difficult or expensive to work in. Today’s intelligent systems offer:

• Self-diagnostics
• Real-time monitoring of process conditions
• In-situ, real-time process measurement
• Communication of system functionality

Intelligent systems have the benefit of being much more efficient than their older counterparts. If a system is monitoring and diagnosing its own processes and output, then it can identify problems sooner with less human interaction—reducing the likelihood of significant damage as well as limiting production of sub-standard product, thereby removing the need for expensive re-work.

In addition to intelligence and efficiency, an optimized system provides the following improvements compared to legacy systems:

• Repeatability
• Reliability
• Consistency
• Accuracy

Many companies look to design a lowest-cost process rather than incorporating these core principles into their design. If you are not making the above areas the primary focus of your design— or worse, not including them at all—the result may be a final process that fails to match your requirements today and in the future.

In the past, optimized technology may have been prohibitively expensive, but not anymore. Today’s systems are less expensive and more efficient than ever, making them worthy investments for companies looking to improve production while reducing costs in the long term.

In addition to productivity and cost-effectiveness, an optimized system design improves on safety by applying twenty-first century safety standards to traditional engineering processes. By constantly monitoring its own processes, the optimized system identifies possible safety or functioning issues before any human could possibly be aware of a problem.

Optimizing your systems pays off in a number of ways—reducing accidents, removing the need for excessive re-work, and keeping costs down to competitive levels. Simply put, optimized system designs save lives, resources, and money.

Identifying a Partner

It’s never too soon to think about optimized system design, but it can be a challenging process. The good news is that you don’t have to go through it alone. You might find that the most effective way of managing your system design process is to partner with an experienced company who has been through it all before.

When considering a system design partner, look for a company that has a proven track record of successful system optimizations and a depth of experience in your specific industry that they can draw upon to understand your specific requirements and who has the resources to provide you with the very best solution.

Ultimately, the long-term benefit of optimization comes in the form of a system that performs well over time, just like the old legacy system it is replacing. The parts for today’s systems are more readily available, and the integrated equipment that helps to automate the processes is an off-the-shelf product. The whole system is simply easier to design, easier to monitor, and easier to maintain. A well-designed optimized system provides a long-term solution that will produce to exceptionally high standards for many years to come.

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