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ABB Navigate: The tip of the spear
The sheer cost of downtime cannot be understated. For an offshore oil platform, every hour of production outage can potentially cost millions of dollars in lost revenue. In food & beverage facilities, lines may need to be sterilized and reset before production can resume. A blast furnace at a steelworks can take several days to cool down for maintenance, and then several days more to heat back up for production to continue. Even a minor trip or temporary outage on a critical piece of electrical equipment can have far-reaching and long-lasting effects on operations and profitability.
By the time a problem has been identified, it is often too late. In a best case scenario, a potential fault might be spotted and remedied before it risks causing a failure. However, as systems grow increasingly complex, the likelihood grows of something, somewhere being missed, particularly if maintenance is reactive rather than proactive. Constantly firefighting problems as they emerge is inefficient, and runs the risk of treating only symptoms rather than underlying causes.
Consider it this way: many people only visit their doctor once they realise something is wrong. The doctor is, in a sense, “the tip of the spear” as the first port of call in diagnosing the issue and prescribing a remedy based on the symptoms presented and patient history.
ABB Navigate occupies this same role, but for electrical assets, equipment, and systems. Yet it also goes a step further. As well as finding, fixing and preventing faults, ABB Navigate delves deeper to find and resolve the underlying causes and inefficiencies, and take steps to modernize and optimize systems and operations at scale.
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Traditional maintenance approaches for electrical equipment are reactive; responding to problems that have already been identified, or manually finding and fixing nascent issues before they develop into full-blown faults. Complicating matters is the fact that electrical equipment often does not show any outward signs of wear, even at the point of imminent failure.
Reactive maintenance relies heavily on scheduled manual inspections, and for personnel to in turn rely on their experience, training and intuition to respond quickly with the appropriate interventions at the right time. Against the backdrop of a growing engineering skills shortage, ensuring that equipment is well-looked after, and that faults are identified before they risk turning into failures, remains an ongoing challenge. Knowing when and how to maintain equipment, or when to make upgrades to meet new regulatory or sustainability requirements, requires a deep understanding of equipment as well as the wider systems around it.
In the event of an unexpected failure, every moment counts. If the right expertise is not immediately available on-site then it can take hours or even days for a qualified expert to arrive, further exacerbating any production losses. In addition, making these calls correctly and at the right time also requires a deep understanding of contextual factors specific to a particular site, and even to a specific application or piece of equipment.
Reactive maintenance can therefore be inefficient and labor-intensive, requiring a larger headcount for on-site maintenance teams, but it is also fundamentally bad for operational resilience. It can result in unnecessary servicing, higher downtime, inflated operational costs, and can also lead to non-compliance issues, perception problems, and even affect share value. Ultimately, while reactive maintenance will address symptoms, it will often fail to address their deeper underlying causes.
Having the ability to predict when, where and why problems may occur can allow them to be solved long before they manifest as failures and downtime. Lost production costs businesses worldwide trillions of dollars per year, and the cost of downtime increases with each passing year.
Proactive and predictive maintenance are about preventing problems and faults before they have a chance to occur. If for instance you have a circuit breaker, and you know from experience that this particular circuit breaker has an expected lifespan of 10 years, then you’ll know to consider replacing it before those 10 years have elapsed. The cost of replacing it early will be far less than the cost of downtime in the event that it unexpectedly fail, making the question of when to replace a relatively simple equation.
However, proactive and predictive maintenance can also be so much more sophisticated, allowing decision-making to be informed by real-time data on the actual condition of devices and systems. Digital monitoring and trend analysis can help to detect trends or recurring issues, and instantly bring them to the attention of the appropriate personnel. Interactive maintenance techniques such as remote access and AR can allow issues to be remedied without having to wait for the right expert to arrive on-site. It can provide early warning of any developing issues, and enable you to replace it at the right time, and without compromising operations.
Constantly firefighting problems as they emerge is inefficient, and runs the risk of treating only symptoms rather than their underlying causes. Focusing on one small aspect of a plant’s operations, or devoting significant resources to keeping one process or piece of equipment online, can risk neglecting the bigger picture.
Changing how we approach maintenance means changing the KPIs by which we measure it, and asking the right questions to begin with.
As systems and technologies grow more complex and interlinked, so too do their operational challenges. Fixing one problem in one part of a plant may lead to unexpected consequences in another. Even fixing many small problems can be counterproductive if the common cause of them is hiding somewhere upstream, and not remedied.
Rather than finding and fixing problems as they occur, we need to understand and mitigate their underlying causes. In doing so, we can predict and prevent faults long before they risk causing downtime. Identifying and solving the big underlying problems can in a single stroke solve all the smaller problems that cascade down from them.
This is why taking an holistic approach to operations is so important. Reliability, safety, security and sustainability are all interlinked. For instance, improving the efficiency of a process can in turn improve the reliability of the component parts that make up that process. This has knock-on effects for safety. Looking at the bigger picture, and taking a strategic approach to modernizing your plant, can unlock long-term profitability and sustainability.
Moreover, adopting an outcome-based approach also opens up vast opportunities to optimize based on your organization’s wider strategic goals, helping to improve output while reducing costs and energy.
Often different stakeholders across a business will have different priorities, making it difficult to achieve a joined up approach. The maintenance technician on the plant floor will not have the same day to day challenges to solve as the CFO in the boardroom.
For instance, the maintenance technician may be rewarded for working overtime or at weekends to fix an urgent issue on a critical asset. In a traditional reactive model this equation makes perfect sense – if the asset is not functioning then failing to fix it quickly will cost far more in lost production. Moreover, if the same fault keeps happening, then this may result in the cycle repeating without ever addressing the root causes.
In contrast, having better visibility of the condition, operation and maintenance needs of assets at all times, as well as the systems around them, can prevent the fault from developing in the first place. The maintenance technician is still required, but they can be deployed on higher level duties such as optimizing equipment rather than firefighting problems as they develop. Rewarding the maintenance technician for the issues that don’t occur can be a much smarter and more forward thinking way of operating, while also reducing the likelihood of failures and production losses.
ABB Navigate facilitates this shift in mindset. It’s widely acknowledged that plants and facilities need to shift from reactive to proactive maintenance to improve the reliability of equipment and reduce downtime risks, however doing so is easier said than done. In addition, more joined up thinking is required to optimize based not just on keeping equipment running day-to-day, but modernizing and optimizing based on the organization’s wider business goals, and setting a path towards net zero.
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