Asset Performance Management (A Perpetual Cycle to optimize costs and risks)

 Over past 3 decades the fundamentals of maintenance and reliability have changed. Maintenance and reliability are also responding to changing expectations whether it’s a random failure in electrical, electronic or wear out/infant mortality in mechanical rotary and static systems. The question that arises is how reliable, how safe will be the system in its operating life and throughout its lifecycle, how much risk is mitigated by performing cost and risk balance and how the optimized maintenance will be achieved (No Over maintenance, No Under maintenance). There are lot of sensors and historians already implanted in the organizations which tell about the status of equipment’s and generate wealth of information but they all are stored in different data banks working on Separate Island. The full use of the data is thus compromised. Sometimes, the job is left up to the work order or work request level or notification level. The asset behavior is often neglected. These all results in a repetitive failure, raised eyebrows, firefighting, bruised elbows, High Maintenance cost, management distrust and loss of customer in some cases. APM integration is the solution which solves all these problems. Basically, APM is a perpetual cycle which starts from asset screening/ Asset Prioritization criteria, strategy development, creating work orders and then closing the cycle in CMMS system. The feed to strategy development is through online data collection modules, historians and condition monitoring equipment’s to name a few and then converting it into optimized strategies. Once, its formalized then the next step is to check and align the behavior of an asset on basis of statistical data modelling and completely eliminate the failure.

Lets take a simple case of pump cavitation. During pump cavitation the vibration spectrum shows a raised noise floor and overall vibration

is also high, the flow is reduced, the cracking marble sound comes from the pump. Its at low

intensity in earlier stage. Now suppose, if I have flow sensor, vibration sensor and visual check

on pump and I can combine and create a rule based indicator once I collect all the data in APM; I can have an better idea of remaining P-F because the best P-F can be revealed from online monitoring. I can squeeze or enhance my inspection intervals on that basis and here is where value is realized by optimizing intervals or once I set the alarm on those rules inspector is almost sure its cavitation and not air entrapment. Once the thresholds are reached to that level then I can generate a work request which will be closed in SAP. The last step is I will query SAP and plot bad actors by cost or failure or by work orders to name a few and get a clue to eliminate the failure completely.

I can also have a better understanding of my Asset Health. An example would be If an analyzer combines the parameters from Age of transformer core, DGA test, Degree of polymerization, operation age from various disparate data banks and collate into APM, I can take a decision on replacement of transformer on APM Asset Health Weighted score in a pure quantitative and asset centric manner. The mathematics of return on investment is straight forward, why should I calibrate my all instruments together. I am testing TT 101001 three times in a year but failure rate is once in a yr, I have 10000 equipment’s like that so one time testing cost 100$ so 300$ x10000=3000000$ is action cost, which should be 10000x100=1000000$ , so net benefit= 2000000$.(2M$). The strategy like RCM2, RBI,SIF and APM methodology drives towards optimized maintenance, reduced breakdowns and a step towards better safety and environmental perspective.