Driving Reliability Improvements by Monitoring Assets Plantwide

Reliable plant operations begin with healthy assets used in the production process and monitoring their health levels over time as they slowly degrade. In this 4 ½ minute YouTube video, Ensuring Reliability Through Enterprise-wide Asset Monitoring, Emerson’s Alessea Lane describes how technologies in the Plantweb digital ecosystem help to improve the overall reliability of operations to meet production targets, ensure safety and avoid high maintenance costs–on various asset types and across multiple sites.



Alessea opens noting how critical reliability is to overall business performance including safety, sustainability, maintenance costs, and production levels. Incorporating digital sensors, operational analytics, edge- and cloud-based computing on plant assets enables companies to establish centers of remote experts to monitor performance across sites. These technologies together help to identify assets that are on a path to failure to enable repairs to be prioritized and scheduled before they affect operational performance.

The Plantweb Optics Data Lake securely and efficiently aggregates global operational data from manufacturing, process control, and IT systems without disruption, contextualizes it, and transforms it into actionable information. This information can be presented to every decision-maker on any device, anytime, at any location. The data is stored in a central repository, so that operations staff and critical systems can find what they need in one place for more efficient analytics, trending, and reporting.

Alessea showed a dashboard that identified unhealthy assets. The dashboard also shows messages from colleagues with actions taken and actions requested. Clicking on the dashboard into an unhealthy asset such as a pump displays more detail such as current process variables and mechanical performance levels including vibration, temperature, differential pressure, and more. Clicking into root cause analysis (RCA) provides additional details into the sources of the problem. In the example she showed, a clogged inlet filter was the source of the problem.

Plantweb Optics Augmented Reality mobile applicationBy knowing the source of the problem, maintenance activities can be performed more efficiently. Given the complexity of many plants, just finding the pump to service can be a challenge. Augmented reality (AR) technology can aid in providing directions to the pump’s location. Alessea show how the Plantweb Optics Augmented Reality mobile application can assist in directing maintenance personnel to that pump. This application overlays digital information on the physical world enabling greater productivity, safety, and insight.

She demonstrated how this works by entering the pump name into search and having the AR mobile app guide her right to its location from her current location. In a case where the problem was not yet known, the AR app can show relevant process variables and relevant Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)-based asset data to better understand the current status. Live remote assistance from a remote expert can walk a technician through the repair process.

Watch the video to see how these tasks are prioritized and streamlined to drive greater reliability and overall business performance. Visit the Plantweb Optics Platform section on Emerson.com for more on these technologies and solutions in the Plantweb digital ecosystem.

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