ARC VIEW

MAY 15, 2023

Honeywell Forge Performance+ for Industrials
Production Intelligence
Optimizes Production Processes

By Mark Sen Gupta and Sharada Prahladrao

Keywords
Honeywell Forge Performance+ for Industrials Production Intelligence, Pro-
duction Processes, Digital Transformation, Operational Performance, IT/OT
Convergence, Predictive Analytics

Summary
The restructuring of businesses and proliferation of digital data is occurring
at an unprecedented rate. Customers on the digital transformation journey
must navigate through complex and often siloed data to achieve their objec-
tives. Established business models have
collapsed giving rise to new structures that must
In an interesting conversation with senior
coalesce flexibly to improve productivity and op-
personnel from Honeywell we learned about
the company’s Honeywell Forge erational performance. In this evolving industrial
Performance+ for Industrials Production landscape, companies must have proper produc-
Intelligence product that helps combat tion insights to plan, operate, and optimize
challenges and efficiently optimizes operations; while ensuring that production pro-
production processes. cesses are conducted safely, efficiently, and
profitably.

Many companies rely on a combination of employee wisdom, workers’ con-

fidence in this wisdom, and whatever operational data is available to
maintain or improve operational reliability and agility. This produces incon-
sistent outcomes across the enterprise at best. End users need better
resources in today’s challenging environment.

Against this backdrop, senior personnel from Honeywell briefed ARC Advi-
sory Group about the company’s Honeywell Forge Production Intelligence
product (part of Honeywell Forge Performance+ for Industrials) that helps
combat challenges and efficiently synchronizes production processes.

VISION, EXPERIENCE, ANSWERS FOR INDUSTRY

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ARC learned about the product, its differentiators, and how its
implementation helps to enhance productivity and operational performance:

• Enables real-time performance management for actionable decisions.

• Reduces operational deviations and improves worker productivity.
• Increases competitive advantage and overall profitability.
• Unified data improves operational performance.

Challenges to Overcome
The challenges that industries face today are numerous, stemming from the
aftershocks of the pandemic, the unending Ukraine war, cultural shifts, and
geopolitical posturing. These have resulted in supply chain hinderances and
a conflicting regulatory minefield where materials can be harder to find and
products can be harder to deliver. Changes in how companies conduct busi-
ness with regards to environmental issues have been elevated to an
emotional public fervor that changes the balancing act of profit and public
relations. Additionally, finding new employees to enter the manufacturing
ranks is more challenging as younger people look for more appealing, “so-
cially and environmentally responsible” careers while older experienced
workers continue to retire taking with them valuable expertise that employ-
ers have relied upon for competitive advantage.

These overarching challenges trickle down throughout an organization re-

quiring manufacturers to respond quickly to the dynamic landscape. One
way companies can address environmental issues is with more efficient pro-
cesses; using less energy and producing less waste. Another operational
challenge is how to efficiently use human resources; having expertise iden-
tify and focus on the most important problems while helping to resolve those
problems quickly avoiding quality issues, unsafe conditions, and downtime.

In response, ARC sees the adoption of operational analytics and the success-
ful transition of it into a scalable core competency as following a common arc
for industrial manufacturers. Companies begin in a reactive state, focused on
operational reliability and with limited, ad hoc, and offline, or manual anal-
ysis. They then move to integrate analytics to improve operations and better
implement a digital-first mindset. Finally, they incorporate customer feed-
back into analytics so that the insights generated enable uniquely
differentiated responses, allowing for quicker production response to cus-
tomer needs.

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Without the support of modern analytics, operations teams must solve prob-
lems based on recency of information and established operational practices,
regardless of their merit. This means that organizations make most decisions
by combining experiential wisdom, workers’ confidence in said wisdom, and
whatever operational data is available with an aim to maintain or improve
operational reliability. Unfortunately, this inevitably leads to inconsistent
outcomes.

This approach is a natural effort to make decisions based on the best infor-
mation the organization has access to and the prevailing knowledge of
experts. However, it leads to reactive decisions based on poorly informed
observations and perceptions of risk, and so it cements a working culture
where incentive to change is lacking. Often, when analytics are later applied,
this way of problem solving it proven to be error ridden.

Hampering efforts to address these challenges in the digital era are siloed
and disparate data. In order to react and even thrive in the current market
reality, end-users must seamlessly integrate an overwhelming load of data
from diverse sources to support business processes and provide real-time in-
formation. IT/OT data convergence must accelerate to combine the best of
both worlds. Data is touted to be the new oil, but it certainly needs refining
due to:

• Poor and inconsistent data quality

• 60 percent of IT/OT data is unutilized or un-
derutilized.
Hampering efforts to address these challenges • Wasted time in searching for data.
in the digital era are siloed and disparate
• Upstream and downstream data relation-
data. There is an overload of data from
ships remain elusive.
diverse sources that must be seamlessly
integrated to support business processes and
provide real-time information. Honeywell Forge Production Intelligence en-
deavors to combat these challenges, improve
production performance, and reduce opera-
tional costs. After explaining the salient features of the product, Honeywell
substantiated it with successful case studies.

The Cloud-based Product

The Honeywell Forge Production Intelligence is a cloud-based product that
is designed to collect cross-functional, multi-dimensional data from process,
control, assets, alarms, and operations. Unification of this disparate data

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provides the needed insight to help maximize and improve operational per-
formance. It contextualizes data across multiple systems to create contextual
data for insight and analytics driven decisions. This product also provides
real-time operational monitoring to unify OT and IT data and deliver action-
able insights at the enterprise level down to the individual process unit for
production operations. Through its integrated perspectives, guided diagno-
sis, and insight to bad actors, industrial users can spend less time sorting
through operational data and more time optimizing performance.
It further provides a unified system of record for the organization by inte-
grating siloed OT data and applications to streamline operations and derive
additional business value by extracting base relationships, contextualizing,
synthesizing relationships, and recommendations to optimize production
operations.

Figure 1.0 Production Intelligence Overview

For end users in Industrials, we provide an analytics & insights solution that provides integrated
perspectives, guided diagnoses, insight to bad actors, optimized production, and sustained produc-
tivity for maximum performance and long-term growth.

Product Capabilities Benefits

*Calculations are based on estimated benefits for a typical 300K bbl / day refinery. Improved worker productivity estimate
based on customer feedback.

Understanding the Capabilities

The five foundational capabilities of the solution are:

• Real-time Performance Management: Aligns business and operations

goals.
• Guided Diagnostics with Root Cause Analysis: Provides actionable in-
sights to accelerate root cause analysis.

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• Operations Deviations Optimization: Reduces deviations and abnor-

malities.
• Predictive Analytics for Process Deviations: Provides early warning and
recommend actions to be taken.
• Intelligent Search & Exploratory Analysis: Captures findings and im-
proves workflows. Knowledge capture is important due to loss of
expertise in industry due to attrition, experienced people retiring, and so
on.

Honeywell explained (via use cases) how the product helps optimize the op-
erating envelope; predicts quality and abnormal situations; provides
automated data validation and deployment; and achieves the expected out-
come. Quoting Honeywell: “It is a tool that enables not only to plan for today,
but provide better insights for tomorrow.”

The company offers three go-to-market modules that allow organizations to

gradually scale their application according to their needs:

Core: Analytical data that pinpoints what happened. This module provides
real-time monitoring capabilities through standardized connectors, persona-
driven dashboards, and operational insights.

Diagnose: Process tools to find out why it happened. Builds on the Core
module’s capabilities and provides robust process visualization and indus-
try-driven analytics to understand likely causes and deviation resolution.

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Predict: AI/ML analysis of what’s likely to happen. Expands on the

capabilities of the previous models and helps to identify, address, and
prevent future production issues through AI insights.

Case Studies
Predictive analytics presents several different benefits to end users. One ap-
plication might be optimizing a process’ operating envelope given a specific
set of parameters that could change based on the market conditions. The abil-
ity to predict abnormal situations and avoid them has always been a high
priority. Insight that allows operations to predict deviations from a product
quality target would allow manufacturers to avoid wasted energy, labor, and
materials. Maintenance might benefit from the ability to predict deviations
in measurements, as well.

Case studies authenticate a solution’s efficacy and the tangible benefits to the
customer. Also, other customers can gain insights and evaluate if the solution
could help streamline their processes, too.

Honeywell has implemented Production Intelligence and is also working

with early adopters. Select initial learnings and insights are highlighted in
the following case studies.

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Streamlined Operations for an Integrated Oil & Gas Company

Customer’s requirement: A software platform that provides a coherent view
of OT Data opposed to the existing disconnected data systems. The objective
was to improve the engineers’ situational awareness & drive root cause anal-
ysis of problems of the engineers.

Solution: Intelligent Search enabled the customers’ engineers to identify ob-

jects of interest with details for OT system analysis. Additionally, Data
Lineage identified system interdependencies and relationships across under-
lying OT application data for troubleshooting & maintenance activities.

Impact: The solution enabled the users to see data relationship details. The
reduction of manual errors allowed for faster, safer, and consistent opera-
tions; and steady, consistent improvements to end users. Human error is
eliminated from both troubleshooting and maintenance efforts, facilitating
faster, safer, consistent operations, and improved knowledge capture.
Streamlining operations reduces unplanned shutdowns, stalls, etc.

Integrated Asset Data Management for a Global Aluminum Company

Customer’s requirement: To compile complex asset data in order to analyze
and contextualize from a reliability perspective. The customer's existing asset
management process was structured through an enterprise asset manage-
ment (EAM) hierarchy, with each individual asset having a unique name in
the system. The customer relied on this hierarchy for all maintenance work
orders and strategies, which created a siloed and spread-out system of rec-
ord. They needed a way to automatically link process data to their physical
assets.

Solution: Scoping a plan with the customer to add additional metadata to

the source data to map the EAM assets into the common asset model (CAM),
covering the mapping for all data that is generated by the process manage-
ment including the process control network data.

Impact: This solution will allow the customer to streamline mapping of asset
data and reduce shutdowns. EAM data from separately-functioning opera-
tions can be contextualized and mapped to a singular source, including data
such as alarms per day, loop performance data, basic process instrument
data, logs, loss accounting data, etc. When all asset data is mapped to a com-
mon asset model, production efficiency increases.

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Accelerated Time to Value for a Multi-site Refinery Operator

Customer requirement: The customer sought to replace about 7 OT applica-
tions; of which Honeywell was selected for 3 (Operator Logbook, Inspection
Rounds, & Production Intelligence), and needed visibility into key perfor-
mance indicators (KPI’s) prior to the startup of new operations.

Solution: Honeywell’s prepackaged KPI’s, domain knowledge, and exper-

tise in a new full SaaS-based solution, and a flexible implementation model
provided a viable solution for the customer. Also, working with a local inte-
gration team made the implementation process smooth.

Impact: The Honeywell solution provides a single version of truth and trans-
parency, pre-packaged refinery KPI’s, widgets and persona-based
dashboards accelerated the time to value for the customer. Accurate, prompt,
contextualized information with visibility into both plant operations and
alignment with business processes. Benchmarking of actual production vs.
plan and achievement of performance targets.

Conclusion
The briefing by Honeywell made it clear that organizations on the digital
transformation journey must deploy analytics to gain operational insights
and optimize performance. Integrated data is critical for the success of every
organization, and Honeywell Forge Performance+ for Industrials Production
Intelligence helps to seamlessly integrate data to take informed decisions that
improve production processes. The product provides an end-to-end visibil-
ity of operations, helps to zero in on problem areas, and recommend
corrective actions. The multiple benefits of deploying the solutions were val-
idated by successful case studies. Such scalable and replicable solutions are
invaluable for companies grappling in a turbulent business environment.

Through discussions with the end user community, ARC concludes that so-
lutions that contextualize data by removing boundaries to create actionable
information are sorely needed. Industry continues to grapple with the loss of
expertise through higher rates of attrition and the challenges of onboarding
new talent. Capturing and institutionalizing the knowledge of how different
buckets of data relate within a single interface and making it available to the
right employees 24/7/365 will be crucial to maintain competitiveness in the
near future. The pandemic, subsequent supply chain disruption, and the
Ukrainian war highlight the need for operational agility. The quicker

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actionable information is available, the faster the business can respond. Busi-
nesses want to respond faster than their competition.

Industrial organizations need to rethink deeply entrenched approaches to

how they organize their work cultures and operate their businesses. This be-
gins with leadership, which needs to evolve beyond transactional decision-
making so traditionally prevalent in industrial markets. Those that achieve
success will instill a digital-first industrial work culture, accounting for (not
penalizing) a workforce with different levels of digital comfort.

For further information or to provide feedback on this article, please contact your
account manager or the authors at
MSengupta@arcweb.com/SharadaP@arcweb.com. ARC Views are published
and copyrighted by ARC Advisory Group. The information is proprietary to ARC
and no part of it may be reproduced without prior permission from ARC.

©2023 • ARC • 3 Allied Drive • Dedham, MA 02026 USA • 781-471-1000 • arcweb.com