In today’s guest post, Emerson’s Amy Davidson, a member of the Asset Optimization team, describes how metals and mining producers can improve reliability by continuously monitoring the health of their production equipment.
As a product manager, it’s my job to talk to customers about the issues they have in their mines and try to come up with solutions to those problems. One issue I hear a lot from mining reliability personnel is the need to pull information together into one location so they can make better decisions about their equipment.
Corporate reliability professionals are responsible for thousands of pieces of equipment in their mines. They have multiple applications that monitor the health and well-being of equipment. They have Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS) that provide information on cost, past work history, and generate maintenance work orders, and in some cases documented work procedures. In other words, they have tons of data in multiple places. So how does one try to make a decision about key equipment with a scenario like that?
The ability to pull information into a common platform from different data sources can help mining reliability professionals manage their assets. Today, many asset management systems have web services, OPC connectivity or links to CMMS systems that can be used to pull key information about assets and business information together, regardless as to where the equipment is located.
Now reliability personnel can see how well their mining equipment is running by seeing alerts coming from that equipment, create detailed work orders to get equipment fixed right and track the progress of that work, and create Key Performance Indicators with information from their business system to track and manage corporate performance goals for equipment.Create Key Performance Indicators to Monitor Equipment Reliability
Most applications have graphical dashboards that allow you find information quickly and if you need to find specific answer query and reporting tools are available to allow you to mine data in the database. Some systems even allow you to notify key personnel that upsets have occurred automatically.
Asset management systems can provide a framework to quickly access information from multiple sources about your mining equipment. Keeping your equipment running and healthy not only improves your mining production it will ultimately will improve your bottom line.
