The Real-Time Diagnostic COMPACS® System
Industrial Equipment Monitoring Provides True Safety, Sustainable Extra Margin, And The Most Efficient Processing Ever
Delve Into SolutionIndustrial Machinery Monitoring For Maintenance And Reliability Managers
For many decades, the maintenance manager has been accountable for safe and reliable facility operation. Although facility operation is conducted by process engineers and operators, responsibility for any failure or breakdown has been pledged to the maintenance team and its manager. It’s true that quality is a top maintenance priority and a key indicator of its effectiveness. However, reliability and condition of equipment in operation depends on many factors. Among them are flaws in facility design, mistakes in machinery design, wrong equipment selection, errors of installation, lack of details of process guidelines, process mode violations, etc.
The Root Causes Of Sudden Machinery Failures
Even with condition monitoring over 80% of industrial equipment failures come from excessive overloads in operation
Harsh conditions degrade machine health considerably, and even a high residual lifespan of equipment doesn’t matter too much
Having a process mode constantly regulated, operators deteriorate the equipment unintentionally
With no feedback from the equipment until breakdown, and no evidence of a process violation, operators blame the maintenance team for equipment failures
Insufficient maintenance quality causes less than 20% of total failures, even if over 30% of executed non-condition-based maintenance is recurring
Pain Comes From Sudden Failures
Equipment breakdowns in operation lead to huge and painful consequences such as explosions and fires, sudden shutdowns and downtime, and excessive maintenance and repair costs that could be reduced with the Condition Based Maintenance paradigm. But still, many industrial experts believe these consequences are unavoidable.
In particular, many petroleum refiners cannot imagine processing with no fires. Although the problem is obvious, the urgency of solving the problem is not clear to C-level executives while the maintenance manager is under unprecedented pressure to find the right tools to solve the problem of sudden equipment failures as quickly as possible.
Equipment Monitoring and Other Tools
Except for the industrial equipment monitoring systems many tools have been used to prevent breakdowns. Nonetheless, all of them are disappointing. There is a list of the most prominent reasons why. Using either a portable analyzer or a more simple measuring device, the maintenance team is unable to reach the desired results due to mismatching between data collection frequency and timeframe of defect emerging, evolving to machine breakdown.
The stationary protection system doesn’t predict any failure as well. Instead, the system merely shuts down a machine while protecting its destruction when a threshold is crossed or a false alarm happens. Moreover, operators commonly switch a protection system off starting a facility operation, because, the system doesn’t allow them to overcome an unstable process mode at the beginning of the operation.
A condition monitoring system has a few downsides as well. The most prominent shortcoming is that its measurements need to be interpreted by an SME who is absent from the facility during night and weekend shifts when the risk of failures is highest.
Recently introduced AI solutions also can’t predict a failure with enough confidence, because, AI needs to be trained with relevant and proven data, which usually doesn’t exist. So, no one aforementioned tool allows for solving a key issue which is preventing sudden equipment failures.
Chasing a failure is unequal to preventing it. Preventing a failure is critical for processing businesses whether there is a high market demand, or the market is slowing down. During a period of high demand, a processing facility should reach the longest possible uptime and highest possible capacity. On the other hand, the business must have flexible operation that allows it to switch the process mode for different products making sure that each order is completed during tough times.
Relieve Destructive Forces Instead Of Chasing Impending Equipment Failures
To be able to prevent a failure, its emergence ought to be observed, and if it’s revealed, urgent actions have to be taken. Urgent relief of destructive forces, which have begun to degrade the weakest parts of the equipment, is a key objective of digital reliability and machinery monitoring because it allows for solving the key problem — sudden equipment failures due to excessive overloads during operation
There are Three Challenges To Get That Job Done:
Every maintenance order has to be completed with the highest quality which means the added lifespan is the longest possible
The second challenge is to implement Operator Driven Reliability approach that forces operators to respond urgently to equipment degradation
The destructive forces must be identified at their emergence; thus, a real-time diagnostic system should monitor not the condition but the state of equipment of the entire facility rather than a few important machines
Those three challenges could be solved within a year or even faster. Having those tasks accomplished, the maintenance manager attains true safety and creates a solid foundation for the reliability journey. The technology of Safe Resource-saving Operation and Maintenance of Machinery (SROMM) enables the facility to generate sustainable extra margin through extended uptime, technically proven process flexibility, and the lowest possible costs with the implementation of a Digital reliability approach and Condition-Based Maintenance.
The Real-Time Industrial Equipment Monitoring COMPACS® System
The System That Provides Success
Early Diagnosis Of The Majority Of Defects With High Accuracy
The industrial machinery monitoring system comprises fully preconfigured physics-based artificial intelligence, easy-to-use software, and proprietary low-cost hardware including wired sensors, measuring electronic modules, and a diagnostic station. The affordable price, tailor-made engineering, and turnkey approach to the system installation allow a customer to equip every piece of rotating equipment and every critical piece of static equipment at the facility with the system. The monitoring system allows the elimination of sudden equipment failures completely. In fact, by using the system, personnel eliminate accidents and downtime, increase availability and uptime, and reduce maintenance costs. Moreover, the machinery state monitoring opposite to the condition monitoring system provides an opportunity to eliminate root causes of bad actors and reconcile physical bottlenecks that limit facility uptime. As a result, the facility generates sustainable extra margin and achieves the most efficient processing ever.
Real-Time Transparency
The industrial equipment monitoring COMPACS® system is a really disruptive tool as it transforms complex technical real-time data into precise prescriptions on what to do to avoid failure. The system utilizes a layman’s language, so the prescriptions are comprehensible even to ordinary people who don’t have special skills or training in nondestructive testing.
In addition, the COMPACS® system monitors the technical state of each piece of equipment as well as its residual lifespan. Therefore, operators get immediate feedback on how the change in process mode affects the state and condition of the equipment. The maintenance team becomes capable of fixing an issue within a given timeframe instantly assessing the quality of the work. The system makes it visible how a failure is evolving, so, there’s no reason to keep Preventive Maintenance practice. Instead, it enables Condition-Based Operation and Maintenance. Furthermore, the system provides management with clear evidence of machinery health, maintenance quality, and operators’ commitment to reliability. Such transparency generates additional efforts from all parties toward equipment integrity, increases mutual respect, and significantly improves corporate culture.
Three Steps To Sustainable Extra Margin With Industrial Equipment Monitoring
Sweep Away Sudden Failures
The industrial monitoring COMPACS® system delivers immense opportunities to customers to shift the facility margin to a new high. Implementation of Operator’s Driven Reliability approach along with Condition Based Maintenance allows to eliminate sudden machinery failures and reach safe and reliable operation
Remove The Root Causes
After eliminating sudden equipment failures, the next step is to find and remove the root causes of equipment failures. Deliberate root causes removal could take a year or even a year and a half to be done. However, Condition Based Maintenance leads to achieving the lowest repair costs for a long time to come.
Widen The Bottlenecks
Every processing unit has bottlenecks that limit the physical ability to reach the ultimate operability. The bottlenecks are caused by mistakes in the facility design, mistakes in equipment selection, insufficient installation quality, etc. By eliminating these bottlenecks, availability increases from the current 80-85% to the technically available 99%, which ensures a considerable growth in the facility margin due to the boost in the annual production rate.
Consider What You Face Before And After The COMPACS® System Installation
Before
There are constant sudden equipment failures
Some failures lead to accidents and fires, shutdowns and downtime
Up to 30% of repeated repairs
The budget shortfall is a common practice
Maintenance and Process departments have tough relationships
C-level management doesn’t allocate enough maintenance budget
Any maintenance or reliability investments are not a priority
It takes a lot of time and effort to convince C-level management to fund maintenance and reliability projects
The Maintenance/Reliability Managers are under constant stress
There is no annual bonus if the plant doesn’t achieve the assigned KPIs
After
The Maintenance/Reliability Managers are able to identify whether failure came from the operation or maintenance side and when it emerged
There’s clarity of what a defect is revealed, and who fulfilled activities to improve machinery health or didn’t
A wide range of standard and on-demand reports about machinery state in operation, machinery with unacceptable state, and action required conditions are available
It’s easier to justify the demand for equipment repair and maintenance
After the root causes of equipment failures are removed, there’s no budget shortfall anymore
The bottleneck elimination boosts the availability of the facility noticeably above 99%
There’s an extra margin for the processing while a reasonable maintenance cost
The annual bonus is inevitable
Interdepartmental respect and a sense of teamwork appear due to an observable working environment where all parties strive to be better
Final Remarks
The gain / pain ratio for the industrial equipment monitoring COMPACS® system exceeds 10 to 1. Sometimes, it reaches 20 to 1. Do you know why? Because, the machinery monitoring system is a tool that forces everyone to be efficient, and it’s a really tough task to engage people to the reliability journey and convince managers to fund the project. However, even those obstacles could be overcome as we provide many initially demanded services for free.
What’s The Next Step Toward Digital Reliability?
The Pilot Project
We develop a feasibility study of the equipment monitoring system installation project at the pilot facility
The Proven Solution
We offer a draft of technical requirements for the system and its installation to make sure you choose the right solution
True Customer Support
We share our knowledge and global best practices to ensure safe and reliable operation using SROMM technology for safe resource-saving operation and maintenance of machinery
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