BP Chemicals' Hull, England facility is the second largest of the group's four UK chemical sites, producing petrochemical-based ingredients for everyday products ranging from pharmaceuticals to paints and detergents. Like every other manufacturer today, the company looked for ways to hold down costs while maintaining productivity and product quality.
One of the initiatives of the Hull facility centered on a Honeywell @sset.MAX Equipment Health Management (EHM) system. According to Ian Stokes from BP, "We wanted to maintain and increase our already high level of equipment reliability in a cost-conscious environment." The EHM system is part of BP's Manufacturing Vision Project which aims for a new level of manufacturing excellence, said Stokes. He explained, "The EHM system's ability to create and automatically access an on-line knowledge database, plus Honeywell's comprehensive asset management technologies, are helping us plan our maintenance better and move further toward reliability-centered maintenance. This enhancement in our maintenance capabilities is part of BP's Manufacturing Vision project that aims for a new level of manufacturing excellence."
The EHM system integration followed a reliability study conducted by Honeywell in 2000 that showed a high potential return on investment. According to John Baron, Honeywell's BP business manager for Europe, Middle East and Africa, "The project follows several BP orders for EHM capability at facilities in the US."
From the outset, the EHM system was expected to deliver on specific objectives set by BP, including:
- Avoid equipment breakdowns to increase reliability and availability.
- Automate the maintenance process.
- Improve plant productivity.
- Move toward reliability-centered maintenance.
- Retain knowledge for corporate-wide use.
- Integrate maintenance and process activities.
- Improve shutdown planning.
Even before the commissioning was completed, the EHM system improved the quality of the maintenance process by finding previously unknown equipment faults and providing inputs for planning the next shutdown schedule.
The EHM system at BP's Hull plant now manages 75 pumps, heat exchangers, fans, valves and compressors in addition to more than 600 control valves and control loops. Incoming diagnostic interfaces are from Honeywell IntelliScout, Loop Scout, and Valve Scout applications and Bently Nevada systems. Outputs are automatically sent to users around the plant. Additional applications identified by BP include monitoring plant excursions for inspection purposes, corrosion monitor alerting, analyzer monitoring, and logging of emergency shutdown systems to eliminate the need for testing.
