Electricity and Control May 2022

PLANT MAINTENANCE, TEST + MEASUREMENT

Field services – going beyond break and fix Choene Ramotshela, Field Services Operation Director for Anglophone Africa at Schneider Electric Through the cyclical demand on production and manufacturing, many industries, such as consumer packaged goods (CPG), use the low-demand time to shut down for maintenance and repairs. Conversely, CPG organisations also ramp up production during the holidays and around peak annual seasons like Easter or other religious or public holidays when the demand for consumer goods is high.

Choene Ramotshela, Schneider Electric.

D uring these times, production, maintenance and technical teams must perform optimally as both low- and high-demand scenarios go beyond the norm of daily operations. In this regard, expert assistance can go a long way in supporting overstretched in-house teams, particularly when operations are restarted or reach peak capacity. A valuable partnership An outsourced field services team can fill an important gap, assisting organisations not only during emergencies but also at critical points – providing spares, additional tech nical support and 24/7 callout availability – and in aligning maintenance schedules with planned interventions when there is a contract in place . Such services support opera tions running at full steam or emerging from a shut down. Moreover, an OEM field services team that includes cer tified engineers will have valuable insight into the equip ment and has likely worked in similar scenarios across the various industries in which it operates. These teams pro vide problem-solving expertise that can save time as well as operational and manufacturing costs. An outcomes-based evolution Historically, field services has been a reactive industry. When an issue arises the maintenance or site manager will call for assistance and the field services team will repair or replace equipment or provide alternative solutions. The move towards digital environments is becoming a major driving force behind field services. For example, most CPG organisations and other manufacturers gener ate an enormous amount of data. With this information, they can take steps to improve daily operations and prepare efficiently for increased production rates and maintenance periods. Field services is then well positioned to meet these or ganisational needs by moving beyond traditional opera tions and maintenance to outcomes-based services. An outcomes-based model entails servicing operational technology (OT) throughout the product lifecycle and using the resultant data to help organisations meet their goals. Instead of calling on field services as problems arise, a company can partner with a services company to perform preventive maintenance, install connected products, mon

Field services can assist in remotely monitoring connected assets, tracking the health and efficiency of electrical distribution equipment. itor asset health, and make recommendations to optimise operations, including modernisation. The move to digitisation Digitisation is at the core of this outcomes-based model. At Schneider Electric we partnered with BASF to assist the organisation in achieving higher uptime and productivity at a substation in Texas in the US. By remotely monitoring connected assets throughout the facility us ing the EcoStruxure Asset Advisor architecture, our services team has 24/7 visibility into the operational health and efficiency of the electri cal distribution equipment. With this data, Schneider Electric provides BASF with customised advice and proactive recommendations to help prevent equipment failure and optimise maintenance strategies, and assist it in meeting its predetermined business goals. Since the beginning of the partnership, BASF has met its intended outcomes, including decreasing the mean time to repair equipment by 15% and increasing the mean time between planned outages by 20%. Field services is not just a break and fix solution; it can now provide proactive and preventive strategies to help industries such as CPG meet their manufacturing and production goals. □

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MAY 2022 Electricity + Control

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