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Central to this revolution is real-time IT and OT data gathered in the operational domain by wired and wireless sensors and then analysed to accurately assess the health of equipment, enabling personnel to make informed decisions around maintenance and repair to drive efficiencies and avoid costly downtime. ‘APM 4.0’ can be of particular value in large resource and emission-heavy facilities housing multiple devices, often in remote or hazardous environments. For example, a condition monitoring solution and sensors for rotating equipment can be deployed through a Bluetooth network: personnel are given an overview of the health of plant assets via a user-friendly dashboard, including proactive alerts of potential issues, avoiding the common problem of applications and data running in silos.

The overarching goal of APM 4.0, of course, is to help customers predict process failures way before they occur, thus improving the reliability, availability and maintainability of their critical equipment. This article will explore the added-value elements of APM 4.0 in terms of sustainability, long-term reliability and costs, and company culture; the evolution of condition monitoring, from time or usage-based strategies to today’s quantitative risk analysis and current-state-of-machine solutions; and how ABB’s APM solutions are helping to modernise a refinery in Kazakhstan.

Wake up to the benefits of APM 4.0

Despite the many benefits of ‘APM 4.0’, there remains a lack of traction for APM in many industries, for a variety of reasons. One is the misconception that asset failures are ‘rare’ events, when in fact they happen on a regular basis, with 82% of asset failures actually taking place at random intervals.¹

This leaves many companies in an unfortunate position: the unlikely nature of these events does not incentivise capital investments in continuous condition monitoring, while time-based maintenance does not catch all potential problems. There is also the cost factor, of course, with many operators believing that new-generation wireless sensors are still more expensive than their traditional wired counterparts. In reality, the recent decrease in the cost of technology that uses connection protocols such as Bluetooth or WirelessHart means that adding the ability to continuously monitor industrial assets has finally become a cost-effective alternative to manual, infrequent condition monitoring.

Despite this, maintenance continues to be done on a fixed time interval or through machine hours rather than based on current data, leading to higher maintenance costs: maintaining assets only when needed can decrease maintenance costs by 20 - 30%, and machine downtime by 20 - 50%.²

The current standard for most small-to-medium sized rotating equipment, therefore, is little to no condition monitoring. For equipment deemed medium to high risk, vibration monitoring is carried out using manual techniques during regular operating rounds. The data may be discarded once the values are deemed to be within ‘normal’ range, preventing the ability to trend and learn from it.

Shockingly, less than 20% of data generated by industrial companies is actually utilised – even less is analysed. This means that up to 80% of what is arguably a company’s most precious resource is lost.

A new era of data-driven APM

Thankfully, the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is changing this. As mentioned, APM has evolved in the past two to three decades from run-to-failure reactive – meaning equipment had to be shut down at short notice for unplanned maintenance – to today’s advanced data-driven technologies.

The next step up from reactive APM was usage or time-based maintenance, where a schedule was used to assess when equipment was about to fail with a view to addressing the issue before it had occurred; however, this failed to take into account that industrial assets are of varying importance leading to high maintenance backlogs with varying return on investment (ROI).

References: ¹‘What is Asset Performance Management?’, ARC Advisory Group, https://www.arcweb.com/technologies/asset-performance-management

²‘The future of maintenance for distributed fixed assets’, McKinsey & Co., (5 June 2020), https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/operations/our-insights/the-future-of-maintenance-for-distributed-fixed-assets.

This article was originally published in the May 2024 issue of Hydrocarbon Engineering magazine. To read the full article, sign in or register for a free subscription.

Written by Stacey Jones, ABB Energy Industries

Read the article online at: https://www.hydrocarbonengineering.com/special-reports/03052024/get-connected/