Many things have changed in process manufacturing in recent years. Teams—including reliability and maintenance—have gotten smaller, budgets have shrunk, production expectations have increased, expertise has become rarer, and equipment has gotten more complex. One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is that teams still need to perform much of their critical maintenance around planned outages, and those outages rely on good data to run efficiently and effectively.

But data has become a problem of its own. As plants have pursued digital transformation initiatives, they’ve added loads of sensing technologies, and maintenance and reliability crews are swimming in a sea of data—or sometimes are just treading water. Today, Emerson’s Brian Overton suggests in a recent article in Plant Services, it isn’t enough to just have data; teams must also organize their data. That is why, Brian shares,

“forward-thinking reliability teams are following a boundless 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.”

Planning for success

Brian explains that there are two key elements to a successful planned outage. First, the reliability team needs to know its assets are healthy enough to continue operation until the outage occurs. Second, the maintenance team needs to go into the outage knowing exactly what they are expected to do, and they need to be armed with all the resources necessary to complete their work on time. But neither of those tasks is easy in many of today’s plants. The reason is simple: both people and data are siloed.

So what is an organization to do to make collaboration and data collation more accessible? One of the most critical steps is to establish top-down visibility via an enterprise-level reliability software solution like AMS Optics. With AMS Optics, organizations can have visibility not only into individual asset health, but also entire plant health to help streamline scheduling and planning. Moreover, that same visibility helps improve collaboration, dynamically including all the critical stakeholders to ensure every base is covered from the very first moments of an outage. Brian shares an example,

“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.”

Intuitive and inclusive

Armed with an enterprise-level tool like AMS Optics, organizations can ensure that everyone—not just technicians with decades of experience—can quickly and easily understand asset health and maintenance priority. Intuitive dashboards provide clear views of asset health in easy-to-understand red, yellow, and green warnings, as well as actionable advice to help guide technicians to the best solutions for many of the most common problems with rotating assets.

Brian offers more guidance for executing better planned outages in his full article over at Plant Services. With the right guidance and tools, any team can improve its collaboration while simultaneously accomplishing more in less time.