Blog post written by Richard Schouten. Richard is a former blogger on Blogpodium and Plant Automation Solutions Lead Chemicals & Natural resources till January 2012.
Information technology has become increasingly more integrated into maintenance. But the advantages are not yet visible. Most often, it is seen as an administrative burden. Yet, further integration of information technology will be necessary in the future to deliver visible results.
Research by the US Department of Energy has shown that the shift from preventive and corrective maintenance to predictive maintenance offers a number of advantages, such as lower maintenance costs, downtime reduction and increased production. However, it requires quite an investment in time and money to realize vertical integration of the current systems.
Vertical integration
As my colleague discussed in his blog post “Information technology will displace DCS”: On average, an engineer collects his data from ten different systems in order to establish the condition of a machine. However, since data is approached differently in every plant and the insights of the engineers might differ, the effectiveness of determining this condition is not the same. One plant might have started with predicative maintenance, while another still operates on an ad-hoc basis. By integrating existing systems, such as DCS and condition monitoring systems, the condition of the machine park can be uniformly determined. By using the ISA95-standard within multiple systems, it is possible to integrate data within a data historian. However, the links are often not available as standard.
In order to be completely vertically integrated, the use of analytics can integrate the data from all applications and databases to one (single) database. Analytics are already being used extensively in financial markets and by governments, but only to a limited extent within the industry. Statistic and failure models are available already, however, they can only be improved by increasingly collecting more data, applying models, and checking these with reality. These data can help to gain more insight in terms of –for example– reliability, failure frequencies, and degradation of machines. But the reliability of these models will only increase if more information becomes available, and more analyses can be made.
The use of ‘analytics’ can be a solution, but applying analytics and processing large amounts of data is not something that can be done by every company. By using the ‘cloud,’ it is possible to store, process, analyse, and present enormous amounts of data. Huge storage and processor capacity is available, which is necessary to create complex analyses and make predictions. Within the cloud, four services are possible: business process outsourcing, infrastructure service, application service, and platform service. Particularly for analytics, the application service and infrastructure service are required. The infrastructure service for sending, storing, and receiving large amounts of data; and the application service for the analytics application that processes the data and presents the analyses via a web portal.
The future is ‘Central support’
The introduction of these applications, solutions, and models does not offer a company anything yet. They will only help if the company changes its infrastructure, organisation, and processes in such a way, that all presented data can be used. A concept for doing this, is the central support organisation (or central control room) where all data and reports are sent and can be presented via portals. Using this, the maintenance, reliability, and integrity engineers can make decisions regarding when and what needs to be done on every machine. The link between operations and mechanics is necessary. A wireless infrastructure will not only help acquiring additional data, but also helps bringing the information to the factory, for calling upon services and for coming to the right solution and prevent failures.
By centralizing knowledge and automating more, it will also be possible in the future to further improve factories and machines, and increase or optimalize the production. By making optimal use of these technologies, it is possible to take a step forward in the availability and reliability of the current production facilities. As a next step, multiple factories within a certain region will merge and more data can be analysed, which will make models more reliable. The data integrity will also increase. There will come a time that the OEMs give their machines an ID, which will help the systems to extract all sorts of information, such as OEM, type, function, serial number, and capacities. The data of the machine immediately helps improving models, analyses, and maintenance programs.
There is also a downside: the engineer will become more of an IT administrator and becomes obsolete during technical difficulties.
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