It might not be enough to know what is wrong with your assets and then make adjustments as necessary. Many companies that have been using predictive- or condition-based monitoring ," typically in conjunction with a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) to track maintenance work ," are starting to realize they could get much more mileage out of a proactive approach.
From reactive to proactive
"Rather than just focusing on doing things efficiently, they're more interested in doing the right things and doing those efficiently," says Brian Maguire, vice president of Ivara Corp., referring to companies that are ready to move beyond early predictive maintenance activities. As such, what these companies now would like to have is "a technically valid list of activities to proactively maintain those assets."
According to Maguire, many companies that have implemented predictive technologies have done so using individual isolated systems such as vibration systems. They often collect data from their production processes in a data historian, but have no easy way to pull the data together. "They're struggling with a gap between the predictive and the process data and the maintenance system that would execute that work," he says, explaining that Ivara EXP, an asset reliability application, helps identify the right work and then passes data to a CMMS system such as SAP.
The Ivara system recently became the first of its kind to have an SAP-certified interface to mySAP Product Lifecycle Management, which includes asset lifecycle management capabilities. EXP collects equipment condition data from controls, sensors, data historians, predictive maintenance technologies and visual inspections; consolidates and analyzes all condition data; identifies potential failures; and recommends corrective actions.
Using single or multiple data points to analyze the data, EXP applies defined rules and calculations to get a true picture of equipment health. Users can see the results through flashing alarms and trending graphs. Ivara 3.0 also offers built-in integration to OSIsoft's Pi and any OPC-standard data collection device.
"Rather than worrying about how efficiently they maintain the asset, they can focus on doing the right work to avoid having failures on those assets," says Maguire.
