Electricity + Control September 2018

PLANT MAINTENANCE, TEST + MEASUREMENT

The bottom line is that electrical preventive maintenance helps reduce TCO and creates more value for your business.

The bottom line is that electrical preventive maintenance helps to reduce Total Cost of Own- ership (CapEx + OpEx) and creates more value for your business. In addition, it helps companies meet the requirements of OSHA, NFPA 70E and other authorities having jurisdiction.

instrumentation were routine while another 28% were in response to an anticipated problem that was ultimately not found upon inspection. While we shouldn’t completely discard preventative practices, there is definitely a growing need to gradually evolve to automation asset performance management (APM) programs to become more efficient and effective.

Asset performance management (APM) is a topic of growing importance for plants in asset-intensive industries, which pretty much means all plants. In this series, I’ll take you through the asset manage- ment story, from why APM is important to what needs to be done, how to do it and, finally, how to measure the success of your APM program. So why do plants need automationAPM? It’s no secret that industrial productivity and prof- itability are severely impacted by the current business environment and market uncertainty. Businesses are looking for ways to improve the bottom line and gain competitive advantage and this means that assets need to be running at peak productivity, producing high quality products while also ensuring health and safety compliance. Plant automation, including field devices, is not only a fundamental building block of any industrial plant but also represents serious capital and op- erational costs. This is why an automation APM solution which manages the life cycle performance of your automation assets is so important for im- proving time to production, safety, operational and maintenance efficiency, and overall productivity. Traditionally, plants have opted for time or usage based preventive maintenance practices to avoid unscheduled breakdowns but this approach is not only labour-intensive, it also doesn’t completely eliminate the possibility of a catastrophic failure. Studies have shown that 63% of maintenance efforts were actually unnecessary and avoidable: 35% of field maintenance trips to inspect process

What are some of the challenges we face in day-to-day operations? Plant O&M teams face any number of challeng- es in their day-to-day operations. Understanding these challenges is the critical first step to devel- oping solutions that maximise long-term asset val- ue. Some of these challenges might look like: • Complex technical environment with multiple protocols, multiple asset types from multiple vendors. • Poor decision support due to information scar- city, information overload or information is- lands which can make it hard to differentiate and prioritise asset health data automatically and in real time. • Knowledge management challenges driven by an aging work force. Significant amounts of tacit knowledge regarding the safe and ef- ficient operation of assets are lost when work- ers retire or leave. • Satisfying the needs of a wide range of stake- holders, ranging from the plant manager to the maintenance supervisor/technician to the plant operators. • The ability to access information on the go and act on it (e.g. raise a work order) using hand- held devices like smart phones, tablets etc. is emerging as a critical need for maintenance staff.

Joy Sonn is a Content Manager and special- ist author at Schneider Electric. Manoj Chan- drasekharan is the Global Director – Asset Man- agement at Schneider Electric.

Electricity + Control

SEPTEMBER 2018

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