Reader Comment – Remote Access

Yesterday, Jake Brodsky left a comment about last Friday’s Short Takes post. I led that post with a link to Jake’s blog post over at Infracritical.com, “Do You Really Need Remote Access?”. In addition for thanking me for pointing at his post (my pleasure), Jake had additional points to make about the potential problems with allowing employees to remotely access and control process control systems. His comments are well worth reading.

I worked for 16 years as a process chemist at a specialty chemical company that did a significant amount of toll manufacturing. In addition to developing chemical manufacturing processes for new products, I was also the main point of contact for production personnel experiencing problems with a wide variety of relatively new processes.

As we moved from a mainly manual operating system to a DCS with process historian and remote VPN access to the control system I was offered remote access to the control system to help manage a new distillation process at the facility. It was taking some time to get operators familiar and comfortable with the complex new process. So, I spent a lot of time on the phone talking them through the process while watching near-real time data from the data historian. It would probably been easier for me to run the distillation myself, but it would never have gotten the operators to the point where they could do it on their own.

As I have noted elsewhere, working through operators on scene, rather than taking over myself, helped me to avoid making critical mistakes when doing something that made sense on the screen, but conflicted with other operations underway at the plant. Operators sitting in control rooms have better situational awareness than someone sitting at home operating remotely.

I agree with Jake, there are probably times when conducting remote operations is reasonable and proper, but in my experience in the chemical process industry (a slightly different view point from Jake’s) those times are few and far between. And they require special skills on the part of the remote operator and well thought out processes and procedures to ensure that process hand-offs are handled with full exchange of information.