Asset Management: The customer’s view

Large companies seem somewhat reluctant to embrace change for change sake. This is understandable when considerations such as inherent risk to safety, environmental and product quality are so important to the ability of the plant to operate.

Unless there are clearly identifiable benefits in cost and project timescales, new technology, which represent significant culture change, like fieldbus, are difficult to get the customer to buy into. Nonetheless, many companies are currently looking hard at new strategies for Total Asset Management and management of the life cycle of instrumentation and diagnostic information provided by fieldbus instrumentation and HART protocol.

The current prevailing view on the upkeep of plants is still to fix when broken. However, an approach to manage assets by continuously monitoring the condition of the plant instrumentation with respect to the operational cycles, facilitates a move from planned maintenance — based on experience and “guess work” — to a structured approach using the information from the instrumentation.

The main costs of an instrument within its life cycle lie not in the capital costs of installation but in the running costs, mainly maintenance. The running costs must be coupled with the potential loss of production due to breakdown. Therefore any system that can accurately predict the condition of the instrument should provide a big step to preventative maintenance, and asset management and thus cost saving.

What seems to have been a hold on this type of system in the past is the complexity of the diagnostics and doubts over whether the information produced was worthwhile.

For any asset management system to be acceptable the system must be easy to understand for the end user, typically the process or instrument technician, and should not be an engineers' toy. It should be unambiguous and clear with its output, with the facility to log the incoming messages with a detailed log of the condition of the instruments.

Systems should have connectivity to other established maintenance tools such as SAP and Maximo for the generation of work orders, with the specific aim to reduce maintenance cost, and provide real time instrument reliability data for analysis for identifying weak points within the process control system. This will provide real and tangible information to achieve life cycle management of the control systems on plant.

These should also be “bolt on” systems capable of operating with any system that is on the market, and should not rely on having a fully integrated (bespoke) system for the asset management to work. In short open architecture.

Current Situation

Such technology has been on the market in one form or any other for some time. However for these systems to be of real benefit companies must be ready to accept new concepts of process control such as fieldbus.

Without this no matter how good the technology for asset management is and how beneficial it maybe, process companies will not progress: It is difficult to see how these systems can be implemented, unless there is a concerted effort for the process industry to embrace fieldbus technology wholeheartedly.

Traditionally projects are driven by capital needs with advantageous and speedy payback. However a fieldbus control system presents a risk and change of culture to the project and business, whereas asset management system would be seen as revenue benefit. Project managers are, therefore, reluctant to take the cost of the asset management onto a project, although it is evident that these systems benefits would provide an overall gain to the business.

If the first step of fieldbus technology was driven forward by the project engineer at the capital investment stage, this would establish the basis for future asset management enhancement.

All too often, companies outsource the design and leave the internal engineers with many projects — so unless the engineer involved with the project is sufficiently forward looking he will not support new technology, more likely it will be “more of the same”.

Meanwhile, the contract company will follow the requirements of the client. So we have an unbreakable circle, where the “more of the same” will not provide the base technology to best exploit the asset management technology.

With regard to HART, my experience is that although HART has been available for many years many companies do not choose to centralise the interface device protocol and prefer to take a handheld unit into the field or to a nearby switchroom to interface into the instrument. However it is simple task to centralise the protocol and thus get access with a proprietary asset

Pushing the boundaries

As fieldbus systems are by nature centralised it is relatively easy to interface into these. Plants that have been built in the last, say, 15 years, or have had major overhauls, more than likely have the technology for asset management. However legacy plants over 15 years old would be a challenge.

Although it is clear that fieldbus systems are ideal for this kind of application there still seems to be some reluctance to take the leap of faith by some companies. Is this short sighted or are our engineers not prepared to take the risk and push the boundaries?

It is not easy to change the mindset of companies, if their engineers and project managers are not prepared to take the risk to provide a good basis for building an asset management structure. Engineers should take on this challenge and show the benefits of fieldbus technology in terms of capital costs and the long-term savings on maintaining the plant with the diagnostics available.

All to often the risk to the projects cost/time weighs too heavily against change. But with the drive to reduce manufacturing costs unless we can embrace the technology that is available, then how can process engineering within manufacturing compete with our overseas competitors?