www.plantservices.

com

SMART SOLUTIONS FOR MAINTENANCE & RELIABILITY

ASSET PERFORMANCE
MANAGEMENT FOR
AUTOMATION EQUIPMENT

NEXT PAGE

AUTOMATION

WWW.PLANTSERVICES.COM

INFORMATION SOFTWARE IN YOUR TOOLBOX

Provide new levels of productivity and connectivity to existing assets
People, processes, and technologies are connecting
and collaborating as never before. Converging information technologies and operational technologies are driving
this transformation creating the Connected Enterprise
and are having a huge impact on global productivity and
competitiveness. Because the Connected Enterprise leverages enhancing technologies such as the Internet of Things,
there are virtually no limits to the ways in which collaboration can take place. It can and will continually evolve and
improve to meet the needs of the user.

a social network has changed how we use and value photography in incredible ways. It has created new products,
businesses and trends, from Facebook, Instagram, and the
selfie to user-generated food images driving customers to
(or away from) restaurants the world over.
For manufacturing, integrated control and information
software similarly can be a game-changer, allowing collaboration capabilities to be relatively easily infused into legacy
assets. For example, new mobile capabilities are being intro-

INTEGRATED CONTROL AND INFORMATION

SOFTWARE CAN ALLOW COLLABORATION
CAPABILITIES TO BE RELATIVELY EASILY
INFUSED INTO LEGACY ASSETS.
duced across platforms such as FactoryTalk VantagePoint
v6.1 software from Rockwell Automation, an enterprise
manufacturing intelligence (EMI) software tool that provides unseen frictionless levels of customization, delivers
data analytics, and lets users track performance metrics.
Users can now customize content across desktop and mobile devices to track data in ways that are unique to specific
viewing preferences, roles, and business priorities, and then
share it instantly with collaborators. For example, plant
managers can view production rates across all lines on a
single screen so they can quickly react if production targets
are at risk. A reliability manager might use the software to
keep a close eye on performance metrics of specific equipment types such as variable frequency drives across a site
or multiple sites, so they can ensure uptime of crucial assets
and assist in predictive maintenance activities.
This new software trend departs from the traditional
define-and-dictate model, in which the system is preprogrammed with specific definitions that dictate what
users can and cannot do, in favor of a more open, lean,
and modular system. This flexibility empowers all levels
of employees, giving them the freedom to develop the
performance-tracking definitions that are most relevant
to their specific operations and then to change them as
needed, all without having to burden IT and OT with additional development. For example, maintenance personnel might be focused like a laser on uptime and have their

A Tyson Foods employee accesses a FactoryTalk VantagePoint

mobile app from his tablet, from which he is able to monitor
~1,500 data points across cooking, sticking, battering, frying,
freezing and packaging operations.

The challenge for manufacturers and industrial operators is providing connections and collaboration that are
nearly frictionless for machine- and user-focused capabilities across operations without making major investments
in new equipment. Capital expenditures are limited across
many industries, requiring companies to focus their efforts
on connecting and optimizing their assorted mix of equipment thats already in place.
Think about digital photography. The move to digital
didnt change what makes a good photograph, but the ability
to easily tag an image to a location or another member of

PREVIOUS PAGE

NEXT PAGE

AUTOMATION

WWW.PLANTSERVICES.COM

so software applications have shifted to dynamically display

the application and best fit for the mobile device being used.
Through continual software updates, manufacturers should
be able to expect that their control and information software
investments will continue to deliver incremental value with
each new release that is backed by user data. These changes
are leading to a greater emphasis on system-level thinking,
cross-team collaboration, and use of lean startup principles
during the software development process.
The Connected Enterprise can help manufacturers drive exponential value out of their existing equipment and new investments. Five years into its own Connected Enterprise journey,
improved collaboration and processes have allowed Rockwell
Automation to lower inventory and realize 30 percent savings
annually in capital avoidance, reduce supply chain lead times by
50 percent, reduce parts per million defects by 50 percent, and
improve annual productivity by 4 to 5 percent. The information
is there, in existing and new manufacturing infrastructures.
Now its about connecting the right data points, people and
processes to unleash exponential value from these systems.

dashboards show them line or machine uptime metrics,

whereas plant managers might define their view by production rates or asset utilization.
Energy management is another area in which information
software is allowing manufacturers and industrial operators
to take advantage of the Connected Enterprise and get more
out of their legacy equipment. Energy intelligence software
that integrates with a plants existing drives can monitor
energy usage and help operators better understand and
compare energy costs. It allows them to track equipment
lifecycles and identify where investments in maintenance
or replacements, for example may be necessary.
This software infusion is transforming how end users access
and use information, but its also changing how developers
create and upgrade their offerings. Equipment and software
cant be developed as independent or isolated products, or on
timelines that dont allow for quick iteration and upgrades.
Everything can now be connected within the Connected Enterprise, meaning that products must be developed to live as part
of a larger ecosystem with a focus on delivering value to different user groups. They must be considered within the context of
other products and multiple roles in a plant.
They also have to keep up with the end users evolving
needs through regular updates and the introduction of new
features based on user preferences. For example, users have
shown a preference for device-agnostic mobile capabilities,

PREVIOUS PAGE

Ryan Cahalane is director of software product

development in the control and visualization
business at Rockwell Automation. Contact him at
rcahala@ra.rockwell.com.

NEXT PAGE

AUTOMATION

WWW.PLANTSERVICES.COM

LESSONS LEARNED FROM EAM USERS

Survey: Plenty of room to transform EAM systems into proactive productivity tools

ARC Advisory Group and Plant Services recently con-

EAM BUSINESS DRIVERS

ducted a survey meant to yield a better perspective on enterprise asset management (EAM) in industrial facilities.
In this column, well explore insights gained on specific
opportunities for users to achieve incremental improvements via predictive maintenance (PdM) and the use of
mobile devices and inventory management solutions. In
addition, well explore strategies for taking EAM systems
from reactive record-keeping tools to proactive planning
and execution systems.

Respondents identified EAM business drivers as uptime,

asset longevity, cost control, and safety and quality. These
all relate to C-suite metrics in companies annual report.
More uptime helps production meet its schedules. This
directly affects revenue and customer satisfaction.
Improved asset longevity allows a company to retain cash.
Conserving cash affects the financial ratios used to gauge
the value of a companys stock.
Better cost control within maintenance positively affects
P&L statements, particularly in asset-intensive industries
where maintenance is a significant cost
Safety improvements help reduce risk, which is evaluated
in the annual report.

SURVEY APPROACH AND RESPONSES

ARC designed and hosted the Web survey, which solicited

participants via emails from Plant Services and ARC. All
respondents received the final survey report.
Between December 2014 and January 2015, we received
141 valid responses that subsequently were used in the
analysis. Fifty-eight percent of the respondents have roles
in maintenance, with the remaining in engineering or
management. Nearly half of respondents represented North
America; the rest were evenly distributed across the rest
of the world. For industries, the asset-intensive chemical,
petrochemical, oil and gas, and military sectors were wellrepresented. There was strong interest from food and beverage, too that industry accounted for 13.5% of responses.
Its likely that FDA regulations are starting to affect maintenance practices in that industry.

Often, maintenance managers lament the lack of management attention to and the inability to obtain funding for
improving an EAM/FSM application. Like everyone else,
C-suite executives respond to metrics. Develop a business
case that connects high-level maintenance goals to the P&L
statement and balance sheet. As well see in the responses
to selected questions, good maintenance improves revenue,
costs, and margin while lowering risk.
PdM and EAM Integration Methods
Ad hoc human
communications
Separate without
info. sharing

Business Drivers for EAM Systems

Improve uptime
(MTBF, MTTR)

66%

Extend asset
longevity

50%

Maintenance
cost control

50%

Safety and risk

management

26% 92%

38%

48%

Improve quality
or yield

34%

28%

88%

PREVIOUS PAGE

Medium

49%

No predictive
maintenance

40%

Auto email to
maintenance

25%

23%

34%

84%

Auto create work

order in EAM

35%

84%

Auto email to
operations

18%

Auto email to
engineering

17%

62%

0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%

High

65%

0% 20% 40% 60% 80%

Total

NEXT PAGE

AUTOMATION

WWW.PLANTSERVICES.COM

MRO Inventory Management

HOW IS PREDICTIVE MAINTENANCE INTEGRATED WITH EAM

SYSTEMS?

ID & dispose of
obsolete inventory

Because users deploy multiple methods, the total responses

in the chart add up to more than 100%. ARC has learned
too often of instances where a failure occurs just as the PdM
system predicted it would. Why wasnt the failure prevented?
Reliability and maintenance groups often operate in separate
silos with little cross-communication. Without a business
process for managing an impending failure that the PdM
system has identified, the impending failure gets lost, and no
action is taken by maintenance.
IT can be our friend. Business process automation
between the PdM and EAM systems closes the communications gap. Verified alerts in the PdM system can automatically generate a work order in the EAM system for the
maintenance planner to schedule.

Reorder & EOQ

optimization

39%

Vendor Managed
Inventory

35%

Duplicate SKU
rationalization

33%

Barcode parts in
inventory

31%

Standard MRO
parts catalog

26%
0% 20% 40% 60% 80%

Companies that have neglected inventory management

usually have huge opportunities to reduce MRO materials
spend and inventory. The low percentage in this chart points
to a broad opportunity for inventory optimization to increase
uptime and reduce materials expenditures and inventory.

WHICH MOBILE DEVICES ARE USED FOR PROCESSING WORK

ORDERS?

Surprisingly, paper remains the most common mobile

device for technicians. With paper, data entry occurs in
batches and often at the end of a shift when technicians
have other things to do and accuracy suffers. More than half
(53%) of respondents said they use paper work orders, with
24% saying they use consumer-grade PCs and 16% using
consumer-grade smartphones.
Mobility extends asset management business processes to
the point of action, creating opportunities to optimize business processes. With a real mobile device, a technician can
process a work order as part of the workflow while performing other tasks, improving data accuracy and timeliness.
When the underlying data is accurate and timely, people
learn to trust the EAM system. It moves from a faulty record
of past activity to a proactive planning and management
tool.

RECOMMENDATIONS

Based on survey results and on other ARC research, we recommend the following actions for owner-operators:
When proposing projects to improve EAM and maintenance
systems, use a business case that connects the high-level
maintenance goals with the P&L statement and balance sheet.
Automate the business process so validated alerts in the
PdM system automatically generate a work order in the
EAM system for the maintenance planner to schedule.
A
 dopt mobile devices and solutions for technicians to use
to improve data accuracy and enable the EAM system to
become a trusted, proactive planning and management tool.
D
 eploy basic inventory management practices; specifically rationalize duplicate part numbers and update the
reorder points.
Move from the EAM being a historical reporting tool to
a proactive planning and execution management system to
reduce downtime and improve asset longevity.

HOW IS MRO INVENTORY MANAGED?

Unfortunately, just one-third of respondents employ basic

MRO inventory management practices. MRO materials are
often expensed at the time of purchase. As a result, the inventory has no value on the balance sheet, becomes hidden
financially, and evades managements attention. Given many
companies inclination to have surplus spare parts on hand
just in case, this leads to excessive inventory. Common
problems include duplicate part numbers and old reorder
points. Despite the excess inventory, it remains difficult to
find parts, and stockouts continue to rise. Stockouts extend
downtime, thus reducing uptime, the key performance indicator for maintenance.

PREVIOUS PAGE

42%

Ralph Rio is research director at ARC Advisory Group, with

focus areas including EAM and field service management.
Founded in 1986, ARC (www.arcweb.com) researches and
advises companies on technology and trends extending from
business systems to product and asset lifecycle management,
supply chain and operations management, energy optimization, the Internet of Things (IoT), and automation systems.

NEXT PAGE

AUTOMATION

WWW.PLANTSERVICES.COM

LAY A STRONG FOUNDATION

Combine known rules with machine learning for better maintenance desision-making

Its no secret that organizations to-

day are focused on driving efficiencies

throughout every area, and are at the
point where their focus is on maintenance efficiency and effectiveness.
As a consequence, in order to reduce
unplanned downtime and maximize
labor efficiency, the new generation of
plant personnel are empowered to act
before equipment failure occurs. From
an asset management perspective, organizations are leveraging industrial data
and analytics while integrating all the
various elements of a maintenance system. Keeping plant equipment running
is critical, but how do plants accomplish that when capital and operational
expenditures are extremely limited?
The Enterprise Asset Performance
Management (EAPM) approach is
about empowering the enterprise,
transitioning from a corporate view
of assets (i.e., managing the lifecycle
through improved maintenance visibility and standardized practices) to
a holistic, integrated, and operationscentric view. These solutions enable
customers to exceed safety, reliability,
and performance goals through data
collection and analysis coupled with
actions and optimization for proactive
maintenance execution.
This vision involves being able to
build connections from the sensor
or smart device assets all the way up
to the ERP systems, making valuable information from the plant floor
more accessible and delivering context
to plant teams on the device of their
choice in order to learn and make
better decisions over time. The idea is
to have a broad portfolio for users to
collect information on assets, analyze

PREVIOUS PAGE

it, determine the next course of action,

and then use that action to further
refine the next set of actions.
In other words, this is a continuous
improvement program, bolstered where
appropriate by automated workflows
and predictive modeling, one that
starts with an understanding of the
Maintenance Maturity Pyramid. The
pyramid represents a different kind of
approach to take for the different kinds
of assets that exist, one that follows the
integrated EAPM model.
At the bottom of the pyramid,
plant personnel often say, we have to
move away from reactive maintenance
modes. A more accurate statement is,
for this specific set of assets, reactive is
the right way to perform maintenance,
because failures do not otherwise affect
my process, and letting these assets
run to fail costs less than the effort to
replace them ahead of schedule.
The next level is where preventive

maintenance (PM) programs come into

play, and workflow automation begins.
On the majority of your assets you can
set up PMs, you can identify a time
frame, and then use the OEM manual
to set up and schedule periodic work.
Youre starting to create automated
ways to remind you that for these pieces
of equipment, you have this specific
regular maintenance action to take.
Moving up the pyramid, conditionbased maintenance (CBM) represents
the initial stage of a more proactive
maintenance approach. The primary
benefit of condition-based approaches
is that they can automate the maintenance process through the monitoring
of user-defined rules that initiate necessary maintenance activities. Conditionbased approaches and technologies
are commonly employed to monitor
industrial asset performance when the
asset condition is known and definable
using rule-based or algorithmic logic.

MAINTENANCE MATURITY PYRAMID

Reliability-Centered
Maintenance

Predictive
Maintenance

Strategic,
Proactive,
Optimized

Condition-Based
Maintenance

Requires a comprehensive
maintenance infrastructure
APR and diagnostics to
predict impending failure

Rules-based logic
using sensor data

Preventive
Maintenance

Planned based on time

or usage statistics

Reactive
Maintenance

Run to failure

NEXT PAGE

AUTOMATION

WWW.PLANTSERVICES.COM

Laying the foundation to achieve these kinds of process

automation benefits involves getting a baseline solution in
place to manage assets: both a work management process to
handle routine maintenance (including some PM) and an
asset structure that makes sense. At that point teams need to
start identifying critical assets, and understand exactly how
they are operating; part of this effort includes identifying and
monitoring the conditions in which these assets are operating.
The result is maximum economic return for all assets, either
through early warning notification of equipment issues, through
making the workforce more efficient, or through improved access to relevant and contextual information that can be served
up on a mobile device. The benefits are real, with the value rooted in system connectivity which enables continuous improvement and better choices. Its simply a matter of asking, what will
an hour of downtime cost me, and what if I can prevent that?

In essence, instead of executing a PM in reaction to

elapsed time, plant personnel can create a maintenance
strategy that is based on one or more conditions, and can
have each of those conditions (or combinations of conditions) trigger events. This does not require any user intervention the system automatically creates a work order that
is then assigned to a team member to execute.
To take it to the next level of the pyramid, organizations need
to tie in predictive maintenance (PdM) approaches to model
the performance of critical assets. The combination of known
rules (CBM) plus advanced pattern recognition and machine
learning (PdM) results in a robust industrial asset analytics
platform where you can look at the model and identify either
a performance issue or an impending failure days, weeks or
months before traditional practices.
With predictive maintenance, personnel know and understand the actual and expected performance for an assets current operational state. Access to contextual data then enables
you to go back and look at previous maintenance and production data for that asset, combine that information, and make an
informed choice of what action needs to be taken.

PREVIOUS PAGE

Kim Custeau is director of asset management at

Schneider Electric. Contact her at Kim.Custeau@
schneider-electric.com.