Fieldbus technology plays an important role in such systems
by providing access to diagnostic data from field devices and
electrical equipment. Traditional hardwired connections limit
the amount of diagnostic data that can be used for maintenance
analysis.
Equally important is to be able to analyse process-related
data, such as that from PID control loops. Plant asset management
systems are also used for machinery and vibration monitoring.
When the diagnostic and process data is collected, maintenance
users can monitor asset health and make the right decisions based
on real-time data, either from maintenance work places or different
types of mobile applications and notification systems.
Enterprise asset management (EAM)
It is crucial for capital-intensive industries to maximise the return
on investment from their asset base. The objective is to obtain
maximum productivity from the asset and minimise the total costs
involved in its acquisition, operations as well as maintenance.
By managing assets across the facility, organisations can
improve performance, reduce capital costs, lower asset-related
operating costs, extend asset life and consequently improve return
on assets.
Enterprise asset management provides the framework
for resource and labour allocation decision processes across
the competing categories of equipment addition/reduction,
replacement and maintenance budgets in order to meet business
needs.
CMMS maintains information about the plant assets and
the maintenance organisation’s operations. This information
helps maintenance workers plan and execute their jobs more
effectively and aids management in making informed decisions.
Promoting collaboration between daily operations and
maintenance requires streamlining the overall work processes
related to maintenance. This means connecting and sharing
maintenance data between the plant asset management system
and the enterprise asset management system.
Asset monitors and visualisation of information
An asset management system gathers information from individual
asset monitors. An asset monitor is an asset specific function
block that verifies related input data according to implemented
maintenance and diagnostic rules. It uses real-time production and
control data and keeps track of the assets’ performance. Asset
monitors vary in complexity from those that simply identify status
changes in an “intelligent” device or identify high, low, or deviation
limit conditions in the control system to those that utilise
advanced process equipment condition monitoring applications.
The maintenance operator can view all the asset monitors
through the maintenance workplace. The operator, at a glance,
can identify the severity of the asset performance from the icon
that appears. By clicking the asset monitor the operator can obtain
information regarding the cause of the fault, the severity of it and
actions to resolve the fault.
Benefits from asset management systems
An asset management system allows for a high degree of flexibility
when it comes to implementing the asset management strategy.
)
Asset optimisation: A single interface for operations,
maintenance, engineering and management to optimise
asset availability and utilisation.
)
Reduced time to repair through optimised work processes:
Integration of disparate CMMS, device management
systems, dynamic overall equipment effectiveness (OEE)
tools, and control systems, streamlines work flow between
operations and maintenance to reduce downtime.
)
Automatic monitoring of maintenance conditions: Real-
time monitoring and alarming of asset key performance
indicators (KPI’s) facilitate fast, reliable implementation of
corrective actions.
)
Plant-wide adoption of predictive and proactive
maintenance strategies: Collects, aggregates, and analyses
real-time plant asset information to provide advanced
warning of degrading performance and impending failure.
)
Consistent reporting of plant asset health: Visualisation of
current health conditions with analysis, features provides
the ability to drill down to the root cause of failure.
)
Regulatory compliance: With integration of the device
management system software, asset management system
can provide users with traceable device calibration
solutions for 21 CFR Part 11 compliance.
Asset management strategies
implementation
When it comes to implementing an asset management
strategy, it is important to consider the assets that play a
critical role in the production and the safety of the plant,
which is particularly important for the heavily regulated oil and
gas industry.
Consideration also needs to be given to the process
historian, which logs all the data that concerns an asset over a
long period of time. This data is used for statistical analysis of
the asset’s performance and maintenance and helps to build
a profile for the asset. Furthermore, third party software, for
example Microsoft Excel, can use the process historian to
extract data for creating trends, graphs and other reports that
help the maintenance personnel to examine the assets’ status
and possible performance improvements.
Conclusion
An effective asset management strategy combines the needs
of both the production and maintenance organisation. With
a seamless connection between PAM/EAM systems and
related working procedures, asset information is provided in
the proper context to operations, maintenance, engineering
and management. PAM/EAM integration allows users from
different departments, in geographically remote locations, to
co-operate on workflows in real-time using different views of
the same data. With this approach, time-to-repair is reduced
and coordination between production and maintenance
activities is made more effective. All these improvements
contribute to better collaboration between plant production
and maintenance departments.
24
World Pipelines
/
SEPTEMBER 2014
