3 Ways Hargrove Uses Your Data to Improve Your Asset Management Strategies
Many facilities manage their assets with a reactive plan – waiting for assets to fail and scrambling to fix them. This can lead to unplanned, sometimes extensive downtime. Some facilities seek to solve this problem by performing scheduled preventive maintenance, which can prevent some unplanned downtime, but can also lead to unnecessary outages and maintenance expenses. With improved data collection and processing capabilities, facilities can now avoid many of these pitfalls by using AI and digital twins to optimize their asset management and making proactive plans, based on facility data, to perform maintenance or replace parts.
Optimizing asset management depends on extracting data from your systems. But making use of the data is more than staring at spreadsheets. Here are three common ways to improve your asset management strategies.
Analyzing Historic Data
Sifting through mountains of data is no easy task, and because of this, many of our clients are not fully utilizing the data they collect. At Hargrove, we can help you set up Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools to mine data and extract the most crucial information from your operations.
For a recent pipeline industry client, our Team was able to comb through their past process and maintenance data using AI tools and find early predictors for previous equipment failures. In this case, we were able to predict a failure for a pumping station with a 30-day lead time, buying the client an opportunity to create a maintenance plan before the failure occurred.
Combining Your Data and Industry Data for Reliability Modeling
Benchmarking your plant performance data against industry performance data is key to understanding if you are getting maximum OEE (Overall Equipment Effectiveness) from your facility. By using standard data from vendors and the industry, we can build a RAM (Reliability, Availability, and Maintainability) model of current client systems. Once a baseline is established for how the system should function, we can add data from your system and see any throughput or reliability discrepancies more clearly. This provides opportunity to optimize performance by focusing efforts on areas where there is clear room for improvement while avoiding wasted effort where there is little potential for return on investment.
By setting up a RAM model for our clients, we are able to find and rectify issues with process design, operation strategies, and maintenance planning to improve facility up-time cost effectively.
Integrating Data for Meaningful Connections
Connecting and analyzing data in one central location can simplify asset management by allowing you to visualize everything simultaneously. The Hargrove Team can help to bring all your data “islands” together to a central location, whether on your internal network or the cloud. This may involve new field upgrades, improvements to networking and cybersecurity, or visualization tools to manage data from multiple sources.
One of our metal processing clients needed assistance with data connectivity for several areas of their facility. Many of their processes were controlled by older hardware with no network connectivity in place. We were able to get those machines connected on a secure backbone and to a cloud-based AI service for improved process insights. In this case, network connectivity allowed for equipment optimization, leading to a higher quality product.
Conclusion
One of Hargrove’s differentiators in asset management is that we have in-house expertise at every step in the process. For many of our projects, we rely on the mechanical expertise of our Maintenance and Reliability group to fully understand the assets being managed. Add in our Controls + Automation group to assist with networks, communication, and AI to properly capture and analyze necessary data. Then our Panel Shop can spec and build control and data collection platforms. When an asset does not appear to be functioning as intended, we can loop in our Process Design group. Our Tormod group can even supplement your maintenance organization to assist with turnarounds and outages. We have extensive knowledge and experience on our side and can use all these resources to ensure the best solutions for our clients.
Regardless of where you are in your asset management strategies, Hargrove can help you better utilize your data to improve the performance of your facility. Contact us today.
