Uptime® Magazine
The mission of Uptime Magazine is to make maintenance reliability professionals and asset managers safer and more successful by providing case studies, tutorials, practical tips, news, book reviews, and interactive content.
In the not too distant past, most senior level managers would cringe when someone said a failure mode and effects analysis (FMEA) needed to be performed on the hydraulic system. What immediately came to mind is a bunch of highly paid people sitting around a table dreaming up ways to eliminate things that may or may not happen to their hydraulically operated equipment.
In some organizations, reliability is not just a word, but a culture that has been built over a period of time. Developing a reliability culture is not solely a top-down approach or dependent on the company’s vision. Sometimes, it is taken as a normal, routine job, while other times, it may get a fast-track status.
For decades, supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) has been the industry standard for asset management. But, the sizable investments in digital twin concept offerings on the part of two leading digital industrial companies have generated much discussion about the long-term viability of SCADA. Gartner’s recent forecast that digital twin will be one of the top 10 strategic technology trends for 2017 is one of several reports that point to momentum in this category.
Aging assets, changing utilization, demographics and regulatory changes precipitated the need for an innovative and comprehensive asset management (AM) program at Nova Scotia Power Inc. (NSPI). Building on the elements of PAS55 and ISO55000, NSPI constructed a program for its power production business. The universal challenges of an aging infrastructure and workforce, along with industry specific and regulatory changes, demanded a shift in the company’s organizational philosophy toward asset management. Many of the company’s generating equipment assets are 30 to 40 years of age and had reached a point where new strategies were required. Among those strategies is the implementation of condition-based monitoring (CBM) techniques.
While the process of reliability-centered maintenance has not changed much over the past 20 years, technology has certainly changed. You are now able to be more efficient in the way you go about reviewing maintenance tasks and you can improve how you use the increasing data available to you. However, even with new technologies, more data and a strong approach to maintenance strategy development, many asset managers are still leaving millions of dollars of their organization’s money on the table. It’s money that can be easily saved if you know why it’s disappearing and how to save it.
Companies’ explosive focus on improving financial performance through leveraged (i.e., fixed) asset optimization has become even more fiery with the rapid adoption of the Industrial Internet, which enables multitudes of devices and equipment to be connected. The result of this combination is accelerating levels of asset management innovations and creativity not seen in the industrial asset space from both a products and services perspective.
In consultation with DuPont, the Saudi International Petrochemical Company (Sipchem) establishes a transformation program to deliver significant and sustainable improvements in business performance.
Machine learning is an approach of exploring and building algorithms that enable computers to continuously learn and adapt.
With utilities, unknown failures and the maintenance that goes into fixing them can add up at lightning speeds. A recent study conducted by GlobalData Power estimates that expenditures for wind turbine maintenance have been projected to rise from $9.25 billion to $17 billion by 2020.
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