

As the next step in the Vigilance campaign started in 2003, Yokogawa Electric Corporation and its group of companies have launched VigilantPlant, a concept that brings together the Yokogawa suite of products and services for plant optimisation and sets a new standard for world-class process control and automation.
VigilantPlant is a vision of the future from a company that sets quality, innovation and foresight as its core values.
It is a path towards operational excellence, enabled by new products and services as a result of Yokogawa's continuing significant investment in research and development.
VigilantPlant spearheads the evolution of the Yokogawa Vigilance campaign, the company's commitment to industry.
Launched at the ARC Forum in Florida in February this year by Yokogawa's President and CEO, Isao Uchida, VigilantPlant has been introduced to bring world-class operational excellence to the global industrial automation market.
Yokogawa's VigilantPlant campaign has established the benchmark for the industrial automation business world, setting new standards for automation vendors and raising the expectations of automation users around the globe.
VigilantPlant is founded on the company's core principles and provides Yokogawa customers with a special long-term relationship that reduces total cost of ownership, enables business excellence through new insights and capabilities, and secures a lifetime of plant efficiency.
VigilantPlant benefits from this quality heritage as it integrates the company's products and services to create an environment where plant operators and other personnel are watchful and attentive, well-informed, and ready to take action, through solutions and services designed to help plant personnel.
The 'See Clearly, Know in Advance, and Act with Agility' is the VigilantPlant philosophy and eliminates unplanned downtime, improves asset utilisation, and allows businesses to adapt to shifting market conditions and customer demands quickly and efficiently.
VigilantPlant empowers plant personnel as clarity of vision is the starting point and foundation of the technology. This means clear visibility of plant information in the form of stable and accurate real-time information exchange throughout the plant.
Fewer blind spots in the plant empowers plant personnel to avoid guesswork and predict and know in advance the next step that utilises the improved visibility to anticipate the changes required in the plant and the process.
It utilises predictive intelligence that anticipates changes for effective planning and optimisation. Encountering fewer surprises, plant personnel can minimise reactive measures and unexpected downtime.
Acting with agility completes the cycle, leveraging the information provided in steps one and two. This step is characterised by fast, intelligent decisions that improve the responsiveness and adaptability of plant operations. Resilient operation free of bottlenecks reduces delays and lost opportunities.
This See/Know/Act approach is grounded in Yokogawa's vision to help transform the role of plant personnel, particularly that of operators, from reacting to problems to making intelligent decisions about the process to optimise plant and business performance.
Looking back at his earlier career as a factory manager at various Yokogawa manufacturing facilities around the world, Uchida said, "The famed futurist Peter Drucker once mentioned that a well-managed plant looks silent and boring. I share the same feeling based on my experience in factory and production control.
"What I hated most was surprise. VigilantPlant is our vision of the ideal plant, where people are focusing their time and energy on building tomorrow's successes rather than solving yesterday's mistakes."
The company is committed to developing and delivering VigilantPlant operational excellence solutions to those areas of plant operations that have significant potential for further improvement. Asset management and safety management are two such areas where the company's VigilantPlant solutions can help improve asset utilisation and thereby contribute to the productivity initiatives of automation users worldwide.
As an integral part of the VigilantPlant operational excellence solution for safety management, Yokogawa has released a new integrated safety management system, ProSafe-RS.
Yokogawa plans to extend its VigilantPlant operational excellence philosophy to such areas as Production Management and Performance Management, where the company already supplies a suite of practical and field-proven solutions.
With operational excellence solutions geared to automation users' future business needs, the VigilantPlant concept will transform the way modern plants are designed and operated; the future will see plants that are operated and managed utilising knowledge provided by fast paced and adaptive information, control systems and support services.
VigilantPlant will support customers and achieve smooth and reliable operation of their plants in a constantly changing business environment. This quiet, calm efficiency in control rooms is the hallmark of VigilantPlant.