Maintenance Technology October 2016 - 22

RELIABILITY SOLUTIONS

RELIABILITY'S FUTURE

Is Now

Effective remote data transfer
and extensive mobile-device
usage will play major roles
in the success of future
reliability programs.

Jane Alexander, Managing Editor
WITH PLANTS AND PROCESSES growing increasingly
complex, it's essential to have a sustainable reliability program
in place. The big question, though, is how does an organization
go from having few or no reliability solutions to implementing a
successful holistic asset-management plan? Nathan Pettus, vice
president of Emerson Process Management's Reliability Solutions
business (emersonprocess.com, Austin, TX), offered several tips:
■ Focus on the culture. Make reliability a cultural institution.
Ensure that every employee knows he or she plays a key role in
keeping the organization safe and productive.
■ Rank asset criticality. Know which assets matter most and
prioritize equipment that the organization simply can't live
without.
■ Don't be afraid to start small. Even small changes in an
organization's reliability culture can have a large impact. Many
companies that started with a simple reliability training initiative have found their way to sustainable reliability plans.
■ Take action. Reliability and safety cannot wait. Identify areas
that need improvement and start taking steps right away.
While many organizations have made the decision to move
toward holistic asset management, the changing face of technology and multitude of available options can make the transition
challenging. We asked Pettus to expand on the holistic trend and
how sites can achieve sustainable reliability from this approach.

MT: As budgets get tighter, how does a plant
justify improvements to asset reliability?
PETTUS: It's important to remember that reliability is a business
strategy. Plants are being forced to look at OPEX [operational
expenditures] as a way to save money because they can't do it with

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MAINTENANCE TECHNOLOGY

CAPEX [capital expenditures] anymore. Improvements in safety
and availability can have a big impact on reliability, which, in turn,
reduces maintenance expenditures. The costs associated with
maintenance expenditures are directly related to profitability and
shareholder value.
This idea is highlighted quite well in a Solomon Associates
(solomononline.com) study of the business impact of reliability
from 2013. According to this research, a plant in the bottom reliability quartile has 3.5 times the maintenance spend of a plant in
the top quartile. So, if a top-quartile plant is spending $10 million
on maintenance, the plants in the bottom quartile are spending
$35 million. That's a lot of lost revenue.

MT: How does the Industrial Internet of Things
influence asset management and what does that
impact mean for the future?
PETTUS: The cost of sensing equipment and infrastructure
has dropped dramatically in the past few years. The question
is no longer, "On what equipment can I afford to put sensors?"
but rather, "What can I do to make the best use of the data I can
collect from my multitude of connected devices?"
Now we need to focus on collecting data and filtering and
routing it to the right people at the right time so they can act on
it, no matter where they are. Although this might mean alerting
a technician on the plant floor to an imminent problem, it morefrequently means delivering essential data to a subject-matter
expert (SME) in a remote-operations center.
The situation can be complicated by the fact that we need to
keep data flowing while not overwhelming technicians with too
much of it. We have to focus on targeted alerting to maintain
OCTOBER 2016

http://www.emersonprocess.com http://www.solomononline.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Maintenance Technology October 2016