BREAKTHROUGH in equipment health

Manufacturing managers readily agree that their plants have tremendous untapped latent profitability, in the gap between a plant's actual productive capacity and its maximum demonstrated productive capacity. New manufacturing technologies are needed to close that gap.

The breadth of the gap is determined by the plant's ability to eliminate or reduce persistent losses to productive capacity. These include sub-optimal yields, offgrade products, reduced or lost production rates, ineffective and inefficient shutdown, activity and start-up cycles, and degradation.

Managing these losses would immediately boost revenues, working capital and, in turn, return on capital employed while reducing variable and fixed manufacturing expenses and cost per unit. In the long term, fixed capital investment would also reduce.

Improving the ability to manage equipment reliability and maintenance is a primary means to reduce or eliminate these losses. However, this opportunity has been more a vision than a reality, because the technology has only now emerged that allows equipment health to be managed fully.

This technique is known in industry as equipment health management (EHM). Honeywell Hi-Spec Solutions' package, `@sset.MAX', is designed to reduce or eliminate the latent profitability gap as a single solution for process situations and equipment health.

Managing equipment health is the most complex challenge in production operations. Any equipment whose operation is essential to the business's results must be included in a health management strategy. Subsequently, plant operators must develop, and institute, the engineering, maintenance and operations details and roles behind that strategy.

Unlike five to ten years ago, industry now knows how to form these strategies. However, it's only recently that the technology has emerged to enable them to be incorporated into the plant functions to manage productive capacity.

Managing equipment health involves the core business process of the diagram, right. The plant takes and processes data from its production process and field activities, and its monitoring and alarm systems use these data to reveal symptoms of failing equipment health. The next task is to isolate the fault, assess its consequences to plant performance, decide what to do and take action. All along, outcomes are verified and the plant operators learn from them.

All plants have this core business process. However, it can only be successful if it can be `managed by exceptions.' Otherwise the plant's ability to proactively manage equipment health is very limited.

The Honeywell EHM system works by extending the `nerve endings' for equipment health management beyond traditional reliability and maintenance sources. It also reads process performance parameters through the plant process historian These are integrated as inputs to search for changes in equipment conditions.

The system also makes information processing and its application dynamic. Previously, equipment information systems have been completely or partially static.

The dynamic system automates the collection and processing of data into `actionable' information. Then, the automated downstream stages shown in the diagram reach into the actionable information to reveal symptoms, isolate faults, assess consequences and decide and execute actions.

Many monitoring and alerting methods and technologies exist, ranging from basic to sophisticated. They serve every type of mechanical and fixed equipment. The most basic method is human observation. The most sophisticated actually gather data and learn to monitor and alert based on complex combinations of inputs.

The breakthrough with @ssetMax is to put in place the open system in which many sensor outputs are integrated as a seamless monitoring and alerting system. This synergy enhances the system's strengths and overcomes its weaknesses.

Intelligent troubleshooting

Monitoring and alerting technologies only reveal that there is a problem. The plant must still find the true fault. Ineffective troubleshooting represents substantial latent profitability.

An EHM system automates this process into a consistent, accurate troubleshooting procedure by drawing upon symptom-fault-action models. Once the first symptom appears, related symptoms are sought automatically through the system. Alternately, the system may direct humans to seek these additional related symptoms and `report back' with the findings.

There are many ways to assess the consequences of the isolated fault. The most basic is to predetermine the urgency for acting on symptoms and failures. Another is to conduct real-time automatic assessments that reveal the current commercial consequences of responding to a failure. A third is to trigger availability simulation to determine the relative significance of the failure in the context of currently existing failures.

There is another possibility. Through Honeywell's abnormal situations management (ASM) technology, it is possible to foresee setbacks that failing equipment health will inflict on process equilibrium. This uses automation to make consistent decisions. This is done with the expertise captured and configured into the EHM system as symptom-fault-action models.

A directed action can invoke a field action through the plant's computerised maintenance management system; or it can invoke an action through process operations. It may also invoke human actions for additional decision-making processes.

Any core business process will have a stage of verification and assessment. Equipment health management provides an internet-based platform to bring together local and remote expertise, information and tools, called the `shared engineering environment.' This capability also reveals a basic requirement for an EHM system. Work processes, participants, information and tools in health management must be dispersed and directed globally.

In his letter to shareholders, the chief executive of a top chemical corporation wrote `our future will be determined by organisational capabilities rather than just the assets we own.' Breakthrough technologies such as EHM will allow plants to manage their productive capacity differently than in the past.

This will allow plant operators and their corporation to discover and master new operational tasks and roles, creating sustainable competitive advantage for the organisations that adopt new enabling technologies. The EHM system not only automates the core business process, but it is also the seed technology to new organisational capability and, in turn, to new sustainable competitive advantage. PE

Richard Lamb, PE, CPA is a principal consultant with Honeywell Hi-Spec Solutions and the author of the book `Availability Engineering and Management for Manufacturing Plant Performance.'