As the process industry strives to improve its efficiency, Gavin Coull, Service Sales Manager at SKF outlines the ways in which businesses can reduce costs and increase production through the maintenance of rotating equipment.
The process industry is in a continual state of flux, driven by rapid advances in technology, increasingly stringent regulations, shifting supply chains and changes in customer needs.
Operators must invest heavily in order to create revenue growth in this environment, while staying focused on their profit margins. As such, the need to improve the efficiency of their processes has perhaps never been greater.
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Organisations must examine every aspect of their operations as they look to drive-down costs. Rotating equipment, for instance, plays a vital role in many process industries.
Each business will have different demands for how its rotating equipment should perform, but the ultimate objective should be to maximise the reliability and output of machinery, while reducing its total cost of ownership over its life cycle.
This might seem like a lot to ask, but by taking a number of steps that ensure that bearings are managed carefully, it can all be achieved.
Initial assessments
In the first instance, an organisation must undertake thorough assessments of its existing operations and practices. Through this assessment, current asset-management practices can be compared with global best practices, as well as average practices, in a given industry.
This comparison will highlight areas where the reliability and availability of assets can be increased, and where operating costs can be reduced.
The establishment of a set of key performance indicators (KPIs), for instance, can reveal numerous opportunities for the improvement of processes and can be used to motivate maintenance teams, but these targets need to be properly conceived and applied.
Common mistakes made by companies when setting-up KPIs include the selection of just a single KPI to monitor, failure to connect KPIs with larger business goals, and the choice of KPIs that are too difficult to quantify and measure.
Condition monitoring
Businesses can then look to avoid unplanned downtime by detecting and diagnosing impending machine failures before they occur. Condition monitoring can play a significant role in achieving these aims and is an important element in the maintenance strategy of most major industrial plants.
The condition monitoring process involves the measurement of physical parameters that indicate a machine’s health. Departures from the norm are detected and analysed, and then corrective actions can be determined.
To exploit condition monitoring systems to their fullest, manufacturers must have a full understanding of their machinery and the parameters that need to be measured.
Proper maintenance
In order to ensure that their bearings fulfil their service-life potential, it is critical that they are maintained properly. Bearings must be mounted using the correct methods and tools, they must be lubricated with suitable greases in the correct quantities and at the correct intervals, and they must be aligned properly so that they are not exposed to loads, friction and vibrations for which they are not designed.
Given that maintenance managers might have a large group of machines to look after, even the absolute best may not have the capacity to carry-out all of these tasks to the necessary levels of precision.
Long-term solutions
With such systems in place, the solving of problems with equipment and machinery should follow logical steps and be relatively straightforward. However, just applying a fix might not get the job done in a way that benefits the business.
It is critically important to apply the right solution in the right way so that the problem does not re-emerge in the future, and root-cause analysis is an important tool for achieving these aims.
Root-cause analysis is used to identify a sequence of events that leads to a failure, and to create a plan to help prevent future failures. This analysis is based on the theory that each and every failure must stem from three causes: physical or technical; human, such as errors of omission or commission; latent or organisational causes that stem from the business’ systems, operating procedures and decision-making processes.
Based on the report generated through this analysis, action can be taken against the true cause of a problem—ensuring reliability in the future.
Waste not, want not
While it might be tempting to discard and replace any rotating equipment components identified through these processes as operating sub-optimally, remanufacturing can often breathe new life into equipment.
Through remanufacturing, businesses can enjoy lower maintenance costs, less frequent failures, high reliability, lower total cost of ownership, environmental benefits and more.
Depending on the amount of remanufacturing required, up to 90% less energy is needed to remanufacture a bearing than is needed for the manufacture of a new one.
Furthermore, cost-benefit analysis shows that significant cost savings can be achieved by remanufacturing bearings—depending on their size, complexity, condition and price.
Driving improvement
Wherever an organisation is on its maintenance journey, there is always room to improve the performance of its rotating equipment so that it delivers greater value.
Whether an operator merely reacts to problems with machines, runs a planned maintenance programme, or uses condition monitoring to take a more predictive maintenance-based approach to managing its critical plant assets—improvements can be driven by adopting some or all of the measures outlined above.
Of course, all of this is easier said than done. It might, therefore, be more cost-effective to exploit the expertise of a bearings specialist, such as SKF, through a performance-based contract.
By assessing current maintenance processes, benchmarked using actual data from similar operations within a given industry, such specialists can highlight areas for improvement that will deliver the best value to a business.
They can then create action plans to rectify any issues found—increasing machine availability and production, while lowering cost of maintenance and total cost of ownership.
