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Checking-in Intuition

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CIOL Bureau
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PUNE: The daunting chase for secret springs and elixir pales in comparison to a more Sisyphean goal that haunts technology industry — solving the mystery called Intuition. More elusive than Mel Gibson’s pursuit of ‘what women want’, and equally powerful in its potential, the search for a really intuitive tool keeps many brains and budgets busy, and of course mercilessly challenged. 'Intuitive technology' is a word which almost sounded like an oxymoron just a couple of years back. But attempt after attempt have raised the bar and shortened the evolution curve. 
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Today, Honeywell Process Solutions announced Intuition Executive. As Amitava Biswas, Country Head, Honeywell Process Solutions India told in a quick preview of this product, which is from Intuition family, it anticipates problems and identifies opportunities helping users to make more agile decisions and take action in order to drive intelligent operations and solve key challenges.  Biswas confidently claimed, “it is about moving beyond simple data access and display to providing context - a unified view of data assets so that business and industrial processes can co-exist seamlessly. For companies in the process industry this results in increased efficiency and the ability to manage and respond to volatile energy costs, complex regulatory changes, and real-world safety challenges.”
Further, in the interview below, we try to track some possible technological, commercial and practical day-to-day dimensions as well as the year-to-year strategic angles that come around with this new product. Murali Mandi, Business Leader — South East Asia, China & India, Advanced Solutions, Honeywell Process Solutions fields many questions and attempts to answer one question that keeps floating around every human mind and every CIO with equal force, albeit different implications. What happens if I get the magic wand called Intuition?
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The name stirs up quite a curiosity. How intuitive or proactive have you managed this product to be? How challenging it was? Any comments on how this takes the goals pursued by in-memory analytics with the likes of HANA or Exalytics?
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Honeywell Process Solutions has been a pioneer in automation control for more than 30 years. We have been in this area helping industrial customers with a portfolio that covers process automation needs, from production and supply chain management to project management services, control systems and field devices. With all that experience, Honeywell has come across process libraries from both a process and operational standpoint. We have also observed the challenges faced in maintaining balance between profitability and safety. In developing our models, we have ensured that all such areas are optimized. For instance, anticipating corrosion. The client can use the model and find out how much is a safe quantity in a scenario of a nuclear reactor. As to in-memory cache, our models make the plant more effective since they cover more than the data areas. Templates, libraries and depth of experience make these models more powerful for plants across a number of scenarios.
What is the whole offering about? How path-breaking would this actually be?
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For many years, the process industries have struggled to find a better way to anticipate, collaborate and act on the mountains of data collected every day in plants all over the world. But what if they could make sense of it? What if companies could not only understand it, but use the data to: Predict problems & identify opportunities in time to act on them? Or capture knowledge and share information and best practices for smarter, more agile decisions? And drive performance with workflows across all assets to achieve operational excellence? Now they can. We are able to connect all pieces because of a five-layer formula. Measure, Contextualise, Analyse, Orchestrate and Present.
So would things from SAP’s stable in process and manufacturing industries be worth watching out for as you launch this suite? Would they be complements or rivals?
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There are certain SAP modules that currently help our customers do the ‘present’ part (with all dashboards related work) very well. But Honeywell is the only solution provider that cuts across all layers. Products from SAP etc, will complement us at some levels. Besides that, Intuition Executive is developed on and extends the functionality of Microsoft Corp. technologies such as Microsoft SharePoint 2010, SQL Server and StreamInsight to meet the requirements of industrial operations.
Can this imply that any customer irrespective of what existing pieces in place already, whether Honeywell’s or others, can consider your product without any bottlenecks? How smooth would it be for a CIO?

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If a customer has chosen our solution in the past it would be a good choice to consider Intuition Executive now. And the same goes for a new-customer scenario. Over the period of time, as the industry matures, everyone wants the best-of-the-breed solution for every area. The challenge is that there is no single one-stop-shop vendor. But our product can integrate multiple applications for multiple vendors in a relatively seamless fashion. The layers of ‘contextualize, analyse and orchestrate’ will work in both the scenarios- existing and new customers.
Incidents like BP Oil leak still baffle engineers. Do such mishaps happen because of gaps in intelligence and technology or despite having technology around? How does your product stay relevant in such a context?
Attempting to answer this question at a very general, industry-level without any specific comments, I would say that the top most priority for any industry is of course - safety. Our product is about making the right information available at the right time and with the right quality. Over the last few years, we have seen too much data burgeon in too less a time. What to do with it, is a big question. If you have information in the right way, bad and unfortunate incidents can be reduced.
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How many tests or real-time pilots have happened already?
We have interacted with many customers globally over the last three years and have talked to people from different roles — maintenance, finance or field personnel. Based on what we have seen, heard or been told, we came with a pilot model. It’s an iterative approach vs. a waterfall approach. There are multiple pilots happening across many sites. Now this is available as a free release under a global launch version.
Will Intuition Executive lead to special skill-set needs? Or will it impact existing skill-sets in any way or make them redundant? 
Not really. Intuition Executive was designed with ease of use in mind. There is extensive use of trends, graphics, context menus, and similar visual displays that will be familiar to most people. Training will be useful to show plant staff all the things they can do with previously inaccessible information.
Intuition Executive helps existing staff operate a plant more effectively and provides benefits in many areas. It gives an enterprise-wide visibility into plant operations information (process data, lab data, operating plans, asset status, etc.) and enables cross functional collaboration on the findings, equipping the exiting staff to make better decisions.