How to Use Your Data to Improve Asset Management Strategies

By Heath Stephens, PE | Digitalization Leader

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 maintenance outages and 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 make proactive plans, based on facility data, to perform maintenance and make operational decisions.

Optimizing asset management depends on extracting data from your systems. However, making use of the data is more than staring at spreadsheets. Here are a few common ways to improve your asset management strategies.

Analyzing Historic Data to Predict Future Failures

Manually sifting through mountains of process data and maintenance records is no easy task, and because of this, many manufacturers are not utilizing the data they already collect. However, various AI/ML (Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning) tools, such as Aspen Mtell and Amazon (AWS) Lookout for Equipment, can now mine data and extract the most crucial information from your operations.

These tools automate most of the work of finding correlations between process indications and pending failures, identifying early indicators that can provide hours or even days of warning. This gives your facility time to develop an operations and maintenance plan to minimize the process outage.

For a recent pipeline industry client, our Team used AI tools to comb through their past process and maintenance data and find early predictors for previous equipment failures. In this case, we were able to predict a pumping station failure with a 30-day lead time, giving the client an opportunity to create a maintenance plan before the failure occurred.

OEE Insights with 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. Most reliability teams use some form of OEE tracking to look at the uptime of various parts of their process, but that’s only part of the whole story.

Using data from vendors and industry guides, we can build a RAM (Reliability, Availability, and Maintainability) model of current client systems, design improvements, or greenfield units. Once a baseline is established for how the system should function, we can add data from a running system and see any throughput or reliability discrepancies more clearly. This enables performance optimization by focusing on areas with clear room for improvement while avoiding wasted effort where there is little potential for return on investment. These improvements may be equipment changes, new maintenance or operational strategies, or warehouse spare parts optimizations.

RAM model studies are performed offline, so it doesn’t matter how advanced or automated your process is. They can usually be completed in about six weeks with minimal time commitments by site personnel. By setting up RAM models for our clients, we can find and rectify issues with process design, operation strategies, and maintenance planning to cost-effectively improve facility uptime.

Integrating Data for Meaningful Connections

While some of our clients are pursuing advanced Industry 4.0 initiatives like AI and augmented reality, many are still working to better connect systems and collect data from the field. Even clients that have their major systems connected may be missing important data from smaller, yet valuable, IIoT devices. Connecting and analyzing data in one central location can simplify asset management by allowing you to visualize everything simultaneously. You can bring all data “islands” to a central location, whether on your internal network or the cloud. This may involve new field upgrades, improvements to networking and cybersecurity, field cabinet construction, or visualization tools to manage data from multiple sources.

For example, one of our metals industry 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, and data retrieval involved a lot of manual activities. We were able to connect those machines on a secure backbone to a cloud-based AI service for improved process insights. In this case, improved network connectivity enabled equipment optimization, leading to a higher-quality product.

Combining Insights and Action

Using data to gain new insights into your processes and reliability issues is great, but only once that knowledge is put to use do you reap any benefits. Some changes are easy, like deciding whether to keep extra pump spares in the warehouse or moving from a quarterly to a semi-annual maintenance routine on a heat exchanger. Other changes, like installing a wireless condition monitoring system or different pump technology, may require more effort and possibly more resources than you have on hand. Many asset management strategies require the involvement of multiple disciplines.

Hargrove has in-house expertise at every step in the asset management process. For many of our projects, we rely on the mechanical expertise of our Maintenance and Reliability Team to fully understand the assets being managed. Additionally, our Controls & Automation Team can 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 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.