che_october-2024 - 28

FIGURE 2. When machinery health software collects data from multiple machines and delivers it to a
centralized location, like the control room, maintenance and reliability personnel can more easily monitor
the health of critical equipment
tions in the face of system updates
was a reasonable task.
Today, however, teams are typically
leaner and less experienced.
But even for teams with the expertise
to configure such a connection,
when experts move on, the team
likely must start from scratch as they
try to manage and maintain their
custom solutions.
Traditional protection systems also
strain lean teams with their need for
technicians to travel to the control
room or field cabinet to view data. In
a single plant, it may be feasible for
a technician to regularly travel to the
equipment to collect critical data, but
this procedure still has users wasting
time on low-value tasks. And in
a fleet of many plants, traveling to a
site could mean someone crossing
the continent or the globe if a local
site does not have the expertise necessary
to analyze data and determine
root causes. These extra steps
can dramatically increase the time
and cost of repair.
If there is no standardization for the
protection systems an organization
installs across its fleet, technicians
can quickly find themselves needing
to be experts in dozens of different
systems. Plants must also maintain
an inventory of hundreds of parts
from many manufacturers, further increasing
cost and complexity.
Perhaps the most significant problem,
however, is that most traditional
28
protection systems are not designed
to also support the predictive data
necessary for providing advanced
warning of developing problems.
They may alert maintenance teams
that vibration is high, and that protection
system will likely - if properly
maintained - shut off the machine
before catastrophic failure occurs.
By the time the system triggers,
however, equipment has likely undergone
significant damage, and
operations have likely suffered from
poor performance for some time.
Protection system flaws
As an example, for one global industrial-process
manufacturer,
a
disparate array of legacy protection
equipment across its fleet had become
a serious problem. The team
had hundreds of protection systems
across dozens of sites, all
from a
wide variety of manufacturers. Over
time, many of those systems became
poorly maintained. Bad wiring,
changed relays and loose parts
on protection systems occurred at
many of the sites.
Trying to maintain a depot of hundreds
of parts from different manufacturers
had become untenable,
and each new technician added to
the team had to learn a variety of
different systems and techniques
to be effective in the field. Reliable
maintenance was simply unsustainable,
and many pieces of critical
equipment were running to failure.
As part of its modernization, the
manufacturer chose to standardize
across its fleet with a new protection
system built for predictive maintenance.
The system they installed
provided the required powerful protection
options, with the flexibility to
expand configuration to provide prediction
data so the team could better
see what was happening on their
critical devices.
More importantly for the success
of their program, however, was standardization
on a single system type
across the fleet (Figure 1). The team
now has consistency of maintenance,
and the company now needs
only a single supply center, with a
smaller inventory of parts. This new
supply system not only reduces the
cost of inventory, it also helps the
maintenance team more quickly
learn which parts they need for any
given task.
In addition, the maintenance team
only needs to know a single type of
protection system, which reduces
training requirements and mistakes in
the field. Everything looks the same,
so it is easier for anyone on staff to
perform maintenance work, whether
they are working in their home plant
or traveling to another site elsewhere
in the fleet. Today, it is rare that the
team must return to the supply center
because they brought the wrong
parts or tools to address an issue.
Machinery health visibility
The maintenance and reliability team
working for the aforementioned process
manufacturer faced two significant
problems that helped them
determine the next steps in their
roadmap. First, critical equipment
could only be taken offline at rare
times for short periods because the
organization needed to continuously
manufacture its product. Second,
because the team was small, any
outages needed to be highly organized,
so the maintenance team
would not go in " blind. "
If technicians were going to work
on a piece of equipment, they
needed to know exactly what work
was required. They also needed to
ensure they had parts and the right
tools on hand so there would be no
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