Manufacturing capital projects have followed a similar path for many decades. The project team designs, executes and commissions the project, provides training for the operations staff, and hands it over to them to run. What is often lacking in this approach is the opportunity to design work practices at the design phase to improve overall reliability over the life of the manufacturing process.

In a Plant Services article, Roots in reliability, Emerson’s Arturo Medina describes ways to incorporate reliability tools and work practices during the project design phase to build a strong foundation for ongoing reliable operations.

Arturo highlights the benefits of project teams and reliability champions collaborating during the project:

Project teams win by delivering faster, less-expensive, and more-successful implementations, while operations and reliability teams reap the benefits of having their own systems online and ready to go as soon as a new project is completed. Operations and reliability leaders who communicate and implement solutions beneficial to project implementation success and to long-term reliability can become project influencers, driving future decisions that incorporate operational certainty into project certainty.

He lists three key strategies to this approach:

1. Using reliability to speed commissioning
2. Using reliability tools to use labor more efficiently
3. Using reliability to reduce device early mortality

Collaboration between the project and reliability teams during improves project and operational performance.

Project teams can use reliability technologies to significantly speed commissioning. By replacing manual configuration with bulk configuration of field devices via templates, teams can save at least one hour of work per device. This can mean thousands of hours saved in the field…

Through collaboration with the project team to perform essential tasks such as device configuration, loop checks, and testing through the plant’s asset management software, though, all activity can be automatically recorded and standardized in the database using the software’s audit trail feature…

In addition, implementing reliability tools early will help project teams deliver better records, more data, and increased efficiency, helping operations and maintenance improve processes from day one.

Read the article for Arturo’s points how these reliability tools improve labor efficiency and reduce field instrumentation early mortality.

Visit the Reliability area of Emerson.com to learn more about the tools and practices to drive more reliable manufacturing and business performance. You can also connect and interact with other reliability and maintenance experts in the Reliability & Maintenance group in the Emerson Exchange 365 community.

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