Tuesday, 21 May 2013

Top 5 Most Common Reasons for ‘Plant Down’ Part 2 - How to Prevent Them

Last week we discussed the top 5 most common reasons for a Plant Down situation or critical incident - one that grinds a production process to a halt. 

This week David Baskett, our Technical Support Manager lists some preventative measures that can be taken to avoid such situations occurring: 

1. IT Changes -  Align your IT systems more with your production department so they understand the impact of their actions. Run all changes first on a test system to iron out any bugs. 

2. Power Cuts – Install UPS/Stratus or similar hardware that can detect changes in electricity flow and act accordingly in good time. 

3. Hardware Failures – Have a water tight backup recovery process in place which can detect when a machine goes down. It should them seamlessly transfer operations to another machine without data loss or downtime.

4. Anti Virus Software – Set rules within the anti-virus software which exclude files in any critically important folders and follow Wonderware release notes

5. Running out of Disk Space - Deploy a monitoring system that measures how much disk space there is left -  and alerts you when it is getting low.

In summary we always recommend testing everything before moving to a live environment - and ensure sufficient backups are taken before making any changes. Also the importance of having a disaster recovery plan in place is crucial! Easier said than done, if you would like more information contact us via email managedservices@solutionspt.com

No comments:

Post a Comment