The benefits of planned outages for maintenance crews: Reduced downtime and improved reliability
Today’s maintenance and reliability teams are under immense pressure. Many teams have seen significant staff reductions as experienced personnel retire, and new experts have become harder to find. As a result, teams are operating with skeleton crews much of the time, and even small crews often contain workers with limited experience. However, even as crews shrink, the need for efficient, effective maintenance continues to increase.
One of the key tools maintenance and reliability teams can use to navigate this web of complexity is planned outages. A planned outage window provides teams with the opportunity to improve the operation of their assets at a much lower cost than an unplanned outage. Moreover, a planned outage is typically shorter than an unplanned outage, allowing teams to accomplish more without impacting operations as significantly—but only if the team is prepared.
Executing a planned outage properly, and running efficiently and effectively until that outage, requires both data and visibility into that data. As plants have incorporated an increasingly wide array of sensors across their operations in the last decade, data has been far easier to come by, but it is not always accessible. Lots of sensors delivering many different measurements in different formats to their own proprietary systems quickly creates a swamp of unusable—or at least unwieldy—data that nobody has the time to find, much less sift through and standardize.
This is why forward-thinking reliability teams are following an automation vision for their data infrastructure, employing seamlessly integrated tools to automatically deliver highly contextualized data on demand to planners and management so they can schedule and coordinate more effective and efficient planned outages.
Why planned outages are difficult
Properly executing a planned outage relies on two core competencies that not every plant has in house. First and foremost, planning a successful outage requires the reliability team to know that their assets are healthy enough that they will not fail unexpectedly before the outage window occurs. If an unanticipated failure forces the team into an unexpected outage before the planned one occurs, the plant can experience downtime that can impact safety, profit, and reputation.
Second, executing an effective planned outage requires preparation by a dedicated planning team. When a planned outage starts, the team needs to know what they must fix, and what tools and equipment will be necessary to execute those fixes. Sometimes meeting the team’s needs will require ordering special equipment, like cranes, that can have long lead times. The team also must know what parts they need on hand, and the team either must be sure they have those parts in supply or get them in stock before the outage takes place.
However, to accomplish any of those goals, the team must first know what assets need attention and exactly what they need to do to execute a successful repair on each asset. All the data the planning team needs to schedule an outage likely exists in the plant, but it can be fragmented across a wide variety of different systems across the plant. Different functional areas use disparate tools that create data in different formats and store it in different servers or workstations around the plant, or even mobile devices.
Collaboration between functional areas in the plant is the obvious solution, but it is not always the easiest. Much like data, people are also siloed in their own areas, and with fewer personnel in the plant, everyone has more responsibilities and less available time than ever. Moreover, in many plants each functional area builds up its own set of asset management tools over time, often from different manufacturers. In many cases those tools do not integrate easily, so planners find themselves running from area to area, collecting data. In many cases, by the time the planning team has everything they need, the earliest data they collected is out of date, but they must work with it if they hope to do any outage planning.
Better planning with seamless visibility
Better visibility for planned outages means starting with a top-down approach that enables everyone in the plant—including outage planners— to quickly and easily see the health of the overall plant and its individual assets. Forward-thinking teams are establishing this top-down view with enterprise-level reliability software designed to seamlessly integrate with their asset management tools. Integrated enterprise-level reliability software collects data from the many different tools in the plant and, using built-in analytics, translates that raw data into an intuitive overall health score on a single, easy-to-use dashboard.
Instead of having to check with the rotating equipment group to gather vibration data from rotating assets, then reaching out to device management for information on valves and other assets, then tracking down additional applications for insights into other wireless devices in the field, the planning team can instead see everything, in real-time, all from one pane of glass. The dashboard provides an overall health score for the plant, and it identifies the specific health of individual assets.
The most advanced enterprise reliability software simplifies asset and plant health displays so users of any experience level can quickly and easily identify which assets need attention. The most critical assets, and/or those in need of the most immediate attention, are highlighted in red. Assets highlighted in yellow are experiencing flaws but are not at risk of imminent failure. Green assets are healthy and need no attention.
Most importantly, the green-yellow-red indication of asset health is only the surface level, and users can click through on assets that need attention to determine exactly what is wrong. For example, when a user clicks on a failing bearing indicator, they will receive actionable advice—maybe that the bearing is under-lubricated and needs greasing. Clicking through on a failing valve might tell the user the valve is blocked, or that pressure is too low for the valve to fully open.
Armed with this actionable advice, teams can easily build planned outage schedules because trends will tell them how long they have until assets fail, empowering them to prioritize which assets should receive attention in each outage. Moreover, they will know exactly what is wrong so they can make sure they have the right personnel, tools, equipment, and parts to perform every repair—well before the outage commences.
Vision drives visibility
The core component of a planned outage is right in the name: planning. Reliability and maintenance teams looking to contribute to the operational excellence of their facilities need to be equipped to make the most of their planned outages and need to know they can make it to those maintenance windows before assets fail unexpectedly.
The solution is taking a top-down approach to maintenance planning, using an enterprise-level reliability solution to enable everyone in the plant to quickly and easily see the health of the overall plant and its individual assets. This data visibility empowers planners to not only execute outages more effectively, but to also ensure unexpected failures do not happen outside those planned windows.