and can go a long way to improving the bottom line performance
of the facility on a day in, day out basis.
Meaningful information
Information is one of the most precious commodities in
business today. Production facilities employing real-time asset
management strategies significantly increase process uptime
whilst reducing maintenance costs. The challenge, however, is
having relevant information available at the right time, in the
right form and to the right person. Therefore, an effective asset
management strategy should present real-time information
seamlessly and in the proper context to operations, maintenance
engineering and management.
Effective asset management systems are available that
provide asset monitoring, notification and maintenance workflow
optimisation of automation equipment, infrastructure, field
devices, electrical equipment, IT assets and production processes;
all in real-time.
The solution brings together, in one user interface, all
information resident in different, traditionally disparate
automation and monitoring systems, to provide a composite
view of the health and performance of an asset. Upon
evaluation of the information, conditions are assessed and if any
degradation is detected then remedies are proposed. A fault
report is generated and subsequently delivered to personnel
equipped to act upon that information.
There are two important benefits of asset management:
increased asset availability and performance, and optimised
operations and maintenance effectiveness.
Increased asset availability and performance
To maximise the assets’ availability and performance, condition
monitoring is used to provide supervision of the asset in real-
time while collecting information regarding the current status of
the asset and its performance. Condition monitoring is able to
predict degrading equipment, enabling corrective action before
the situation becomes a problem. However, this is only possible
using models contained within a plant asset management
system. If there is a malfunction or deviation from the expected
performance, the operators are notified with an alarm in the
workplace and also via SMS or email.
The asset conditioning reporting tool tells the operator:
)
What/where is the problem.
)
The type and severity of the problem.
)
The cause of the problem.
)
Who is the appropriate operator to initiate action.
)
What specific actions are needed to solve the problem.
Optimised operations and maintenance
effectiveness
To promote collaboration between operations and maintenance,
and streamline the overall work processes, plant owners must
connect and share maintenance data between the distributed
control system (DCS) and a computerised maintenance
management system (CMMS). Now maintenance operators can
plan their activities, track spare parts inventory and even order
external contractors in the same system that is aggregating
condition monitoring data across the enterprise; one system, one
complete view of the assets, enterprise-wide.
New exciting technologies, for example advanced control
systems that can integrate real-time condition monitoring and
CMMS, are daring companies to re-think their asset management
strategies. This is driving an upswing in predictive maintenance
practices at process plants and pipelines worldwide.
Realising a complete asset management strategy requires two
types of systems; plant asset management and enterprise asset
management.
Plant asset management (PAM)
Plant asset management systems provide a single application
for predictive diagnostics, document management, calibration
management and device configuration for managing different
types of assets.
Figure 5.
Asset categorisation.
Figure 4.
Corrective maintenance can cost ten times as much
as predictive maintenance strategy.
22
World Pipelines
/
SEPTEMBER 2014
