Remote monitoring: A cure for maintenance headaches

Jon Furniss

Physicians and production facilities are alike in many ways. Every day, medical professionals are expected to evaluate and treat patients, bringing the sickest of people back to health. Like doctors examine their patients, production facilities must constantly assess their machines, monitoring them to ensure they’re in good health and restoring them to it when they’re not. Often, physicians must make decisions with less-than-ideal information. In the past, the same has been true for production facilities when it comes to plant-floor data.

Luckily, that’s no longer the case. The information needed to diagnose, treat and even predict the health of plant-floor equipment is now little more than an Internet connection away. By tapping into continuous, online monitoring systems, production facilities and OEMs can remotely access real-time production data from their machines and systems. Everything from key product measurements such as switch temperatures, CPU usage, and flow rates, to faults and alarms and higher-level production trends can be collected, monitored and analysed around the clock and around the globe.

Frequently, medical professionals see the symptoms of a problem, but diagnosing the cause and determining the best treatment option is complex. For production facilities, the comprehensive view offered by remote access to plant-floor data makes it possible to do what so many doctors only dream of doing — diagnosing the cause of problems and applying the best solution to fix them, all without leaving the comforts of home.

With that in mind, let’s look at few of the symptoms many production facilities are suffering from, and examine some options that will provide relief.

Symptom: My IT staff is too lean to monitor all my machines and processes properly
Treatment: See a specialist

The proliferation of network technology on the plant floor practically mandates collaboration between IT and production — a change that has drastically altered the roles of professionals in both areas. Not only has the scope of their responsibilities evolved, but the technology that these professionals must manage has become increasingly complex.

Along with myriad other responsibilities, the IT staff often is tasked with monitoring complicated and interconnected processes and machines. Unfortunately, these individuals often don’t have the training, time or skill set it takes to make sure these systems are optimised.

In addition, because IT professionals often aren’t solely focused on production, they lack understanding when it comes to the urgency of production-related issues. Outside production, a server crash may result in a printer or email outage and the expectation is that it will be addressed within a few hours. Inconvenience is generally the largest consequence of such events. But in production facilities, downtime is lost profit, and responses must be activated in minutes, not hours.

While IT professionals often are stretched too thin to understand and address complex production issues properly, OEMs and other automation experts specialise in this area. They possess a deep knowledge of plant-floor technologies and understand the many intricacies of how systems affect production.

Thanks to advancements in remote monitoring technology, taking advantage of this expertise is easier than ever before. Through secure Internet connections, automation professionals can help troubleshoot plant-floor issues, discover trends and identify process improvements. They also can be alerted to all changes in processes and machines, so they can identify and respond to warning signs quickly — usually within minutes — and work to correct them.

Symptom: I never have enough time for maintenance
Treatment: Change your lifestyle

Most people don’t go to the doctor very often, and when they do, something is already wrong. They don’t make time for regular checkups even though the majority of medical professionals would say it’s the key to identifying and solving problems early. In general, production facilities intuitively know the same goes for preventive maintenance activities. In reality, however, it’s often just as difficult to make the time for preventive maintenance on machines as it is to visit the doctor for that annual physical.

Remote monitoring can help change the status quo when it comes to maintenance. Allowing remote access to machine data enables OEMs and other automation professionals to access plant-floor data and perform a variety of support and maintenance activities — from suggesting overall infrastructure health improvements to monitoring individual process tags.

Regular preventive maintenance is particularly important because superficial problems with processes and machines can be indicators of more substantial issues. For example, when a pump isn’t performing well, the problem often can be traced to a faulty pump seal. However, this failure frequently is symptomatic of another, more serious problem, such as misalignment or overpressure. By proactively monitoring the right machine conditions and operating data, specialists can remotely identify causes and correct them before they become catastrophic issues.

Symptom: I don’t know what’s happening at my plant in Asia
Treatment: Go remote

As production becomes increasingly global, more and more companies are spreading their operations abroad. Often, this distance comes with a price: decreased access.

Companies with factories in China, oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico, pipelines in the Canadian Rockies, and locations in a variety of other remote places often have limited, if any, access to their machines — not to mention the production data they generate. For most, lack of access means maintenance and repairs are costly, time-consuming and sometimes dangerous. What’s more, lack of insight to data makes it nearly impossible to make process improvements.

In the past, production facilities have tried to establish access to remote locations by creating a VPN connection — an activity that is time-consuming and complex. But once this connection is set up, plant managers still have to conduct the monitoring themselves, which leads to the same expertise and effectiveness problems that production facilities are experiencing in locations where access isn’t an issue.

Fortunately, today’s remote monitoring solutions present a different alternative. In fact, they were designed with this sort of global accessibility in mind. Remote access technologies make it easy for global production facilities to access their facilities and equipment regardless of location. Working with specialists trained to monitor these facilities can save additional time and money.

In the past, for example, if a medium-voltage drive in a remote location went down, the production facility would need to wait for spare parts to arrive, and call upon a trained technician wearing appropriate personal protective equipment (PPE) to open the drive and service it. With remote monitoring, specialists monitor the drive and receive warnings when the temperature increases or the current has risen too high. Upon receiving these alarms, specialists can access the drive and repair the issue before it becomes a catastrophic event — all without ever opening the cabinet.

This proactivity and responsiveness, along with the ability to pass monitoring responsibilities to the specialists who know it best, minimises downtime and can bring significant productivity savings — and that’s just what the doctor ordered.