This is Part 1 of a 5-part series on Smart Reliability IIoT Condition Monitoring; be sure to check out Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 and Part 5!
At Allied Reliability (Allied), we find our industrial clients need to increase the uptime and productivity of their equipment and reduce their maintenance and operational costs. Historically, Allied has delivered benefits meeting these objectives with Reliability Engineering Consulting and development of cost-effective equipment maintenance plans (EMP). Allied then offers to implement the EMPs using training, talent acquisition, or providing condition monitoring services under a full-time or part-time contract.
To develop the cost-effective equipment maintenance plans, we use (and continue to use) our Asset Registry (AR) tool to catalog the assets, our Asset Heath Matrix (AHM) tool to identify failure modes the equipment maintenance plan should address and to identify the sensors that detect defects leading to the failure mode. Allied then relies on our operational standards we use in performing condition monitoring services (OP2) to provide guidance to the interpretation of sensory inspections.
Allied’s Smart Reliability incorporates these three tools (AR, AHM, OP2) as an application built on the PTC ThingWorx platform. Doing so, allows our clients to build out their equipment maintenance plan using user friendly diagrams and calculations of failure mode coverage. Allied helps in setting up the equipment maintenance plan, yet the tool can be used by a Reliability Engineer and his/her technical team, beginning with the AR tool.
Predictive Maintenance & ROI
Those clients embarking on an Industry 4.0 digital strategy are finding that predictive maintenance offers one of the larger returns on investment (ROI) as compared to other focus areas of a digital strategy. The ThingWorx platform not only hosts our Smart Reliability application, it is able to “wrap and extend” other applications used by the client for operations and maintenance of their equipment. These other applications include the client’s computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) where they track expenses and work on their equipment. This “financial and work effort” data is useful to track and trend economic impact of reliability efforts. Further, the client typically has a plant historian, where many of the process parameters (pressure, flow, speed, temperature, on/off, etc.) are stored and trended. This data is useful in understanding what the equipment is doing from a functional perspective. Pulling together from these additional sources and combining it with condition monitoring data provides the equipment maintainer with a holistic view of the equipment in a single place. Historically, the equipment maintainer needs to hunt and peck, pulling reports and data together in something like excel, to make his/her report monthly, if that. Not at all real-time… With ThingWorx and Smart Reliability, that report is now a live dashboard with up to date data from just a few moments ago.
Smart Reliability Benefits
As an application on the ThingWorx platform, Smart Reliability benefits from a wide range sources using ThingWorx industrial connectivity components. This includes the condition monitoring data, as well as the CMMS data and the Historian data. All the data is in a single web page for the equipment, allowing the human to notice new relationships in the data. This breeds the opportunity to predict future maintenance needs and future performance of the equipment/machine.
Ultimately, we begin to address more than the two core needs stated early, Allied is helping our clients tackle the new Smart Manufacturing (or Industrie 4.0, or China 2025) movement in our industries. All the while, Allied, its Smart Reliability application, and the PTC ThingWorx platform work together to deliver:
- Uptime and reliability
- Lower maintenance and operational costs
- Test, learn, and develop long-term digital strategy
Won’t you join us today? Click here to learn more about Smart Reliability.
