Efficient Plant January 2018 - 13

feature | data management

Preparing for IIoT technologies tomorrow starts with data decisions made today.
set up until they have arrived on site, putting asset
configuration on the critical path and increasing the
risk of budget and schedule overruns.
Additionally, the process of generating equipment documentation becomes more costly and
cumbersome after a project has been completed.
Instead of spending technician hours going through
disorganized data delivered after project completion,
organizations can save a great deal of money on the
documentation process by incorporating a dataacquisition plan into the project scope. As a bonus,
properly planned asset-data collection will lead to
more accurate and organized plant documentation.
In a best-case scenario, a data-acquisition standard would be developed with the requirements
incorporated into the bid specifications. Organizations that embrace a standard in the early stages
of project planning will realize four key benefits:
extended asset lifecycles, general plant protection,
on-time/on-budget project delivery, and plantpersonnel engagement.

EXTENDED ASSET LIFECYLES
Establishing equipment baselines is key to realizing
long asset life. As previously mentioned, assets begin
to degrade as soon as they are put into service, so
equipment examined six months after installation
will not be running the same as it was on the first
day. Maintenance teams need to be able to collect an
accurate predictive maintenance (PdM) baseline for
new equipment so that later readings and examinations can be compared with the as-delivered, or
new-asset, readings.
In one example, an organization experienced
problems with a series of new mixers they had
installed. Maintenance personnel performed
motor-circuit-evaluation (MCE) testing on the
mixers after they had been in operation for a couple
of months and thought that the readings seemed
acceptable. The mixers continued to fail and the
organization went through multiple replacements.
Eventually, the maintenance team established

JANUARY 2018

an MCE baseline on a new replacement unit and
determined that the rapid degradation was due to a
manufacturer defect. Had they established a baseline
before plant startup, the cost of multiple replacement
mixers could have been avoided. Unfortunately,
since the mixer documentation was delivered after
the units were online, by the time the assets were
set up in the CMMS and a work order generated to
perform the MCE, the damage was already done.
Another factor is how thoroughly and accurately
maintenance databases are populated. If equipment
documentation is delivered at or near the end of
project implementation, the EAM and CMMS will
likely not have been populated with the information
needed to establish an equipment baseline. It is common for organizations to fill in fields with dummy,
or placeholder, information while waiting for accurate specifications to arrive. Frequently, many fields
are left blank indefinitely as the company focus shifts
to production. Common examples of these fields
include serial numbers, model numbers, manufacturer, equipment type, and description.
Once startup occurs, no one has the time to go
back and reconcile the EAM and CMMS data with
the documentation received at the end of the project.
As a result, the maintenance databases are compromised when operations begin and, as data drift
takes hold, the databases only get worse. These data
issues can have a significant impact on maintenance
efficiency.
Not having access to asset data in the CMMS
significantly increases the amount of time it takes a
maintenance planner to set up a maintenance procedure, order parts, and write work orders. Instead
of having the information on hand in the CMMS,
the planner will have to make a trip to the asset and
hope the data plate is accessible. Depending on the
plant or process, this could be a loss of several hours.
When organizations develop a data-acquisition
standard and include it as part of the project's bid
specifications, they can ensure that their equipment
will be properly configured, tested, and documented
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Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Efficient Plant January 2018