BHP’s award-winning Ignition SCADA implementation improved their Alarm Management System by bringing all the information to one ‘Single Pane of Glass’

This project is a high-performance human-machine interface (HMI) which assists
technicians at BHP’s Technology Remote Operations Centre (TROC) for Minerals
Australia in monitoring and managing the status of critical technology infrastructure
and components across the operations.

BHP’s TROC HMI project built with Ignition SCADA won a prestigious Firebrand
award at the recent Ignition Community Conference (ICC).

We congratulate the BHP team on this landmark project built by BHP for BHP,

What was the problem?

BHP Technology Remote Operations Centre (TROC) operates 24×7 supporting critical
technology across assets in Australia to prevent and minimise safety and production
impacts to the assets.

Prior to HMI, BHP TROC technicians performed this process manually, monitoring
thousands of uncontextualized emails, manual and automated phone calls, or simply
through “eyes on glass,” monitoring multiple application screens and logs.
A missed alert or delayed response could result in the shutdown or evacuation of an
entire operation, or worse, someone being injured.

And the solution?  Ignition SCADA

After extensive research, BHP defined “what good looks like.”
TROC technicians receiving ONLY critical data, presented in near-real time, in a way
that provides actionable context, displayed on a single pane of glass.

Developing the solution was complex, as BHP’s Australian operations consist of:

• 30+ sites
• 20+ network domains
• Tens of thousands of devices
• Hundreds of thousands of data-monitoring points

For the software backbone of HMI, BHP chose Ignition SCADA.
Ignition provides the means to present information in a modern browser interface,
provides a zero-install environment, is mobile-device-friendly, and allows BHP to present
all the information to the TROC technicians in a familiar SCADA environment.
Importantly, Ignition’s an off-the-shelf solution with traditional SCADA functionality,
alongside modern IoT connectivity options.
The development team has spanned BHP’s Australian assets to collect device health
and process data via the existing OSI PI historian infrastructure, collecting and contextualizing 1.1 million data points every few seconds.

This data is automatically mapped back to data models, while bringing in ServiceNow
data on current incidents, problems, and changes, to provide more context in an
alarm situation. BHP also hooks into predictive Splunk alerts and consolidates this along with all the asset
downtime into Ignition alarms.

BHP monitors:

• 800+ servers
• 1,400+ switches
• 79 GE PLCs
• 257 AB PLCs
• Many services and applications

Most of the data models built for these devices in Ignition are scripted and automated,
so BHP can quickly deploy at scale and provide the ability to refresh when new devices
are added or removed from the landscape.

As iControls Pty Ltd is the Australian Distributor of Ignition SCADA we provide continued technical support in BHP’s development and deployment of this solution.

See Below Video that Showcases the BHP  Implementation that was Showcased at the ICC 2021 Conference.

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