A quick poll of the industry professionals attending the Maintenance & Operations: Better Together session at the 2019 ARC Industry Forum in Orlando last February revealed that conflicts between operations and maintenance groups remain the norm in many organizations. Operations are focused on short-term production goals while maintenance takes a longer-term view to help ensure asset reliability. This often leads to conflict between the two groups. But, as we learned, new Industrial Internet of Things (IoT)-enabled tools can help improve collaboration between the two groups in pursuit of common organizational goals. This is consistent with ARC Advisory Group research.
Several end-user presentations focused on this theme, with an emphasis on how the respective organizations overcame conflicts. This included a presentation by Jane Arnold, head of global process control technology at Covestro, a global provider of premium polymers.
Arnold shared that a Covestro plant suffered major corrosion damage in July 2018 due to HCL formation caused by water leaking from a steam generator water side to the process side. After significant damage to critical equipment and a 20-day outage, Covestro invited the predictive analytics team at AVEVA to perform a retrospective case study. The team used Prism software on historical data seeking possible early warning signs prior to the major failure. The study proved that 10 days prior to the event, something had happened. Had the data model been available to view the spikes, the problem would have been recognized and acted upon quickly to minimize the damage and lost production time. By sharing such information, operations and maintenance are linked to create a more sustainable path forward. Correlating what the operator sees on his screen with an overall model based on years of operating history enables a better decision.
Read the full story, "Resolve maintenance and operations conflicts," from our sister publication Chemical Processing.
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