This is Part 4 of a 5 part series on Smart Reliability IIoT Condition Monitoring; don't miss Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 5!
Smart Reliability delivers value to Allied’s clients in two categories:
- Faster time-to-value for technology implementation, and
- Improved equipment reliability yielding business value
Let’s start with the business value. Why did we choose predictive maintenance and equipment productivity as our Smart Manufacturing effort? Reliable equipment:
- Produces more product: more uptime yields more product
- Yields higher quality product
- Costs less to operate
- Faster return to service when maintenance is performed
- Improved safety as reliable equipment is more safe and predictable
- Minimized impact to environment, especially with chemical equipment
- Lower cost of spares when optimizing spares inventory and
- Less surprises, firefighting, and stress on employees
Smart Reliability plays a significant role in achieving business value. What makes it unique, is its implementation on the ThingWorx platform yielding faster time to value: It takes less time to set up the application.
Digital Twins
Allied’s Smart Reliability database is implemented as a series of digital twins within the ThingWorx platform. Each equipment instance has its own digital twin, downloaded from Allied’s master Asset Health Matrix database.
The digital twin has the equipment failure modes analysis already completed and included in the equipment digital twin model. There is no need for plant reliability engineers to perform and organize failure mode information into the Smart Manufacturing ThingWorx platform and Smart Reliability.
The equipment mashups or webpages are provided as part of the digital twin “ThingModel”. The mapping of condition monitoring sensors to failure modes, and the alert values are also part of the digital twin ThingModel. Commissioning is the process of connecting the digital twin ThingModel for each equipment instance, to the data sources the ThingWorx platform is able to connect to. In other words, the commissioning process is focused on connecting the equipment digital twin to the its condition monitoring data sources.
All is ready to go virtually out of the box, allowing us and the client to focus on the business economic factors, to insure we are providing financial impact to the client. This is the “time to value” benefit of Smart Reliability. Other smart manufacturing offerings do not have the extensive prebuilt digital twins, ready to go and connect.
