Capital project team members are under constant pressure to meet project deadlines and get the manufacturing or production process up and running. But how do they ensure that the capital assets installed will run reliably over time?
In an Efficient Plant article, Data Standards Lead to Project Success, Emerson’s Scott Janzen describes the critical need for early planning to develop and execute a data acquisition plan for all the assets in the plant that will require ongoing maintenance. He opens noting:
Assets begin to degrade as soon as they are in operation. If the documentation for those assets is lost in a storage room collecting dust, equipment may not receive the level of maintenance that it truly needs.
If not planned effectively up front and if asset technical data is delivered late in the project:
…assets cannot be set up until they have arrived on site, putting asset configuration on the critical path and increasing the risk of budget and schedule overruns.
Manufacturers see four benefits incorporating this data acquisition plan into the project scope:
…extended asset lifecycles, general plant protection, on-time/on-budget project delivery, and plant-personnel engagement.
A very important activity upon startup is:
…to collect an accurate predictive maintenance (PdM) baseline for new equipment so that later readings and examinations can be compared with the as-delivered, or new-asset, readings.
Without the data planned, organized and in place, it is very difficult to save this baseline information in way to easily retrieve it later to perform performance comparisons. Scott shares an example where not collecting this baseline performance data caused a manufacturer to pay for a series of mixer equipment failures, when the fault turned out to be with manufacturing defects in the mixers.
He notes the reality of most project teams on the difficulty in going back to complete activities not originally planned in the project scope.
Once startup occurs, no one has the time to go back and reconcile the EAM [enterprise-asset-management systems] and CMMS [computerized-maintenance-management software] data with the documentation received at the end of the project. As a result, the maintenance databases are compromised when operations begin and, as data drift takes hold, the databases only get worse.
Scott recommends:
Starting a maintenance program properly means allocating time and resources to effectively and accurately document asset specifications. To accomplish that, organizations need to have a data standard in place.
Read the article for more on how incorporating this asset data acquisition plan into the project scope streamlines operations after startups and avoids the pitfalls of early reliability issues caused by a lack of awareness, as well as the importance of site champion to lead the data standards development and ongoing governance.
You can learn more about how Emerson’s Operational Certainty consultants can help you effectively plan, scope an execute this effort. You can also connect and interact with other reliability experts in the Reliability & Maintenance and Operate & Maintain groups in the Emerson Exchange 365 community.