The age of wireless

Integrating mobile technologies into your maintenance reliability program

by Terrence O'Hanlon

Downsizing, slowing sales and revenues, and an increasingly less experienced workforce have created additional stress on maintenance and operations, while the need for improved reliability increases in order to compete in a global market economy.

There are numerous strategies — such as Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM), Planned Maintenance Optimization (PMO) and lean maintenance — designed to ensure high-level reliability.  These require careful planning and thorough analysis in order to effectively implement the results.

There comes a time in the process, though, when the outcome must move onto the plant floor. This involves many different trades, engineers, operators, supervisors and managers. Accurate information flow and planned responses are crucial to a living program’s success.

The use of handheld computers is an effective strategy for some companies as they begin to move from a reactive to proactive approach for the bulk of their maintenance work.

Reliability basics
Most reliability programs are designed to ensure that the plant or individual pieces of equipment perform their intended functions. Most commonly, you do this by performing a disciplined analysis of what could prevent each piece of equipment from performing its function. You then establish a plan to mitigate that potential failure.

Several factors such as criticality, safety and environmental consequences, cost, and available monitoring technologies go into the maintenance decision. The result may be to let the equipment run to failure for its expected life cycle and then have a spare on hand (plus the proper labor, time and tools available to simply replace it when it fails to function). Another result may be a decision to monitor the equipment with vibration analysis, oil analysis or other condition information in order to provide an early warning that allows a scheduled repair or replacement, or even prevent premature failure by removing or correcting a failure mechanism. In some cases, the decision could even result in a requested redesign to avoid undesired consequences due to single-point failures.

Once the analysis is complete and the plan set, communication and information between all the parties involved in plant operations and maintenance are critical to making sure the program is followed, and that corrections can be made.

Mobile workforce technologies
You may use or at least have seen the increasing use of personal digital assistants (PDAs) to store personal and business contact information, schedules and appointments and other notes to keep you organized. Many of these technologies are now finding their way to the plant floor.

Rugged, pen-based portable computing devices are now available for the industrial environment. Systems capable of showing drawings, reading radio frequency identification or bar code tags, and wirelessly interfacing with computerized maintenance management and reliability information enterprise systems speed the flow of important information while ensuring accurate information is collected during operator rounds.

Several such devices offered by SAT Corp. and Advanced Reliability Technologies LLC, both of Houston, are currently being listed by Underwriters Laboratories for use in hazardous locations (UL 1604 – Class I, Div. II, ABCD).

Pen-based computers work by using a stylus/pen device that touches the screen in order to input data. Codes for activities, trades, failures, action requested, work completed and other fields can be set up to ensure consistent data entry. Handwriting can be recognized and converted into text, so typing skills are not required.

 “Users today are experiencing the benefits of having actionable information provided to the operator at the point of execution, enabling better decisions or directed actions through the use of integrated handheld technology,” says SAT Corp. president Don Frieden. 

The results are improved management of production and maintenance operations, improved asset performance and reliability, increased production throughput, reduced unplanned outages, and minimal safety incidents.

Reliability initiative results
Many organizations are undertaking reliability improvement initiatives such as RCM. Effective implementations yield significant benefits, especially when focused on proactive condition-monitoring activities that are performed by asset operators.

However, Advanced Reliability Technologies (ART) president Walt Sanford cautions, “One of the more time-consuming and typically unanticipated aspects of an effective RCM installation is implementation of the reliability-based task recommendations, once identified. This includes the many condition-monitoring tasks typically destined for the plant operator. This effort has often taken as much time and resource, in the beginning of the process, as that required for the RCM analysis itself.”

Integrating technologies
For many users, implementing a comprehensive RCM program along with a mobile workforce automation program makes sense, as there are synergies (such as time- and skill-intensive process mapping) that would be performed separately if implementations were separate.

By integrating RCM processes and software focused on operator involvement in reliability with mobile data collection software and hardware, asset management organizations can greatly reduce the resources required for implementation, while enhancing the effectiveness of the results.

Equilon Enterprise’s Puget Sound refinery is in the process of implementing a plant-wide RCM process, integrated with mobile workforce technology. Equilon Puget Sound recognized that effective RCM implementation would provide significant benefit to the refinery. 

“We needed to take a more proactive approach to maintaining our equipment and to concentrate those efforts on the most important things,” says Equilon Puget Sound RCM coordinator Dave Hanson. “Having a proactive approach will give us the opportunity to anticipate failures and avoid the high cost of catastrophic failures.”

Equilon also recognized that to be effective in a condition-based approach to reliability management, technology was needed to effectively manage the work. 

“We wanted our operators to have the ability to collect, track, trend and act on process data that did not come into the control room,” says Hanson. “We also wanted to better manage and capture the results of preventive maintenance activities performed by technicians.”

The synergies of the integrated approach already are being realized.

“Implementing the ART RCM process means we now have a formalized, well-structured program that resides on our computer network and is accessible to the whole organization,” says  Hanson. “Although we have only been using the handheld units for a few weeks, we are already seeing the benefits.”

As an example, operators used to collect daily spent-catalyst data with entries in a paper system. Someone else then added the daily tallies and performed an analysis to determine how much new catalyst to order. That information went to the buyer. 

Now, the operator enters the data directly into the handheld system every day. The computer does the analysis, which is accessed by the buyer, eliminating one operation and decreasing the chance of errors.

As another example, Hanson says, “We suspected (through less formal monitoring techniques) that a critical centrifugal compressor was using too much seal oil (indicating a failed shaft seal). We began planning for an unscheduled shutdown to repair it. However, operators on each shift started recording oil additions with the field data collectors, and we discovered that oil usage was actually normal.”

The repair was canceled, avoiding an outage that would have resulted in hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost production and repair costs.

Summary
It’s clear that condition monitoring and data collection activities, as well as the seamless movement of field-collected data to organizational decision-makers, are critical factors for the success of any effective reliability management process. Closely integrated implementation of a reliability improvement process and a new generation of mobile workforce technologies remove barriers to success that often exist.

Terrence O’Hanlon is the publisher of ReliabilityWeb.com, an asset reliability Web site for the plant maintenance community. For more information, e-mail or visit www.reliabilityweb.com.

This article appeared in the October/November 2002 issue of MRO Today magazine. Copyright, 2002.

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