Predictive Maintenance

Technology often gets all the credit when it comes to predictive maintenance. That’s unfair. Technology is important, but it’s only a small piece of a great predictive maintenance program.

The organizational culture has to be right. New processes need to be tested and refined. Data needs to be expertly managed.

In short, the journey to predictive maintenance is slow, but worth it, if it’s done right. Maintenance Holding BV is the right partner is doing and achieving this. Maintenance Holding BV is the missing link in your Predictive maintenance programs.

The six pillars of a predictive maintenance program

Data

The link between past, present and future

A predictive maintenance program needs a lot of information to be successful. Without the data, you can’t predict anything. If you don’t have a baseline about what’s normal for a pump or a conveyor, you can’t identify or predict anomalies.

Processes

A steady hand on the predictive maintenance ship

Simply put, your processes are the way you work—how your maintenance team plans and does the things it needs to do every day to be successful. An effective predictive maintenance program helps make your whole operation predictable so it can maximize everything from working hours to asset performance.

Tools

Trusty sidekicks ready for the spotlight

Tools and parts play a huge role in allowing predictive maintenance to go from a far-away dream to a realistic goal. Predictive maintenance isn’t new. The difference between 20 or 30 years ago and now is that we have the tools and understanding of parts to do it better and at a lower cost.

Equipment

Not all machines were made for predictive maintenance

Anyone who says reactive maintenance can be totally eliminated has never had their windshield cracked by a stray pebble. While this isn’t exactly an on-the-job example, the lesson still applies to the shop floor: You can’t anticipate everything.

Technology

The glue that keeps the other elements together

Technology is like a dash of salt in a predictive maintenance program—it ties the other ingredients together and makes them shine. It helps you manage, facilitate, and optimize the other pillars of predictive maintenance.

People

Culture and strategy people are key in you program

The long journey to predictive maintenance always starts with people.

It doesn’t matter if your predictive maintenance plan looks good on paper, if you don’t have buy-in from the people who are doing the work.

Machine Health Check - Condition Monitoring

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Visual inspections

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Proactive Maintenance

Proactive maintenance is one highly effective but overshadowed generic maintenance strategy, which when effectively implemented, is significant in improving equipment reliability. Many maintenance teams tend to follow a reactive maintenance approach, due to its low initial costs and low requirement for planning. After all, it’s easier to do nothing than something. Unfortunately, a “fix it when it breaks” approach sends technicians scrambling, and often results in overtime, high repair costs, lost production, and severely reduced asset life. These consequences run counter to an organization’s goals of asset availability and profitability.

Types of Proactive Maintenance

There are many types of proactive maintenance:

Planned Corrective Maintenance (CM)

Maintenance that is required to restore an asset to optimum or operational condition, but does not need to be performed immediately. Planned corrective maintenance occurs when a maintenance need is expected, allowing you to schedule corrective action ahead of time.

Preventive Maintenance (PM)

The most common type of proactive maintenance. Preventive maintenance is scheduled using time-based or usage-based intervals.

Condition-based Maintenance (CbM)

Maintenance carried out when an asset’s monitored condition reaches an unsatisfactory level. Using real-time condition data, maintenance can be performed before failure occurs.

Predictive Maintenance (PdM)

Maintenance scheduled using predictive analysis, based on an asset’s monitored condition, historical performance data, and advanced analytics. Predictive maintenance forecasts when failure is likely to occur, allowing maintenance teams to take preventative action.

How to Implement a Proactive Maintenance Strategy

Once sufficient asset and historical maintenance information is collected, you can proceed with implementing your proactive maintenance strategy. The following steps provide a framework to help your implementation go smoothly.

Select a Project Leader

One of the most important keys to success is selecting an effective team member to spearhead the project. Ideally, the project leader will be someone who has intimate knowledge of maintenance needs, such as a maintenance supervisor, maintenance scheduler/planner, maintenance manager, or inventory clerk.
Involve Key Stakeholders

Asset maintenance affects the entire organization. Therefore, an effective proactive maintenance program is one that receives input from and informs multiple maintenance stakeholders. Stakeholders may include the following: Front-line maintenance technicians, Production operators, Operations engineers, Operations management, Safety managers, Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs), Upper management.
Create an Asset Registry

An asset registry is a list of all the assets that you are responsible for maintaining. Creating an asset list ensures that records are up to date and that all assets are accounted for when planning maintenance. A CMMS stores important asset information and makes it easy to track maintenance performed on each asset.
Identify Critical Assets

Critical assets are assets that are integral to business operations and result in major consequences should they break down. Determining an asset’s criticality helps you prioritize where to focus proactive maintenance efforts. It makes sense that the more critical the asset is to the organization, the more should be done to protect it.
Determine Effective Maintenance Activities

Once critical assets are identified, determine the best way to keep them running. At this stage you can keep things high level, but should at least determine the type of maintenance to be performed and how often. Later, you can hash out the specifics of what each task entails.
Create the Proactive Maintenance Schedule

The first step to creating the proactive maintenance plan schedule is to decide on the official start date of the program. Then assign maintenance activities to specific days, using the frequencies and estimated duration identified earlier.

Energy Programs

At its core, energy conservation is the practice of using less energy in order to lower costs and reduce environmental impact. This can mean using less electricity, gas, steam or any other form of energy that you get from your utility and pay for. With finite energy resources available on our planet, actively conserving energy when possible is beneficial individually and to our larger energy systems.

Energy conservation vs. energy efficiency

While energy conservation is the practice of trying to use less energy for cost and environmental reasons, energy efficiency means using specific products designed to use less energy. These two concepts are inherently similar but involve different methods. It is not only about saving energy, also about safety.

Steam and condensate programs

Steam and condensate leakage has a negative impact on steam system and plant operation due to reliability failures with valves, connections, flanges. It causes production issues.

The thing about leakage is that we have to understand what causes leakage. Probably the number one cause on any steam leakage, or condensate tube leakage, assessment and a root cause analysis, connections, is flange connections. They are notorious for failure and observed every time we do an assessment. The other possible causes are; tube fittings, valve internal leakage, external leakage, water hammer, piping.

Maintenance Holding BV measures about 30.000 steam traps every year, in different European countries.
A leaking steam trap costs a company on average €1.700,00 per year. That is one thing.
We also see a lot of bad, wet, damaged, and poorly installed insulations. That creates not only energy losses but also a lot of condensate in your pipelines, something that you don’t want.
Gasses and compressed air-leak surveys

Leaks in your compressed air system may be increasing your compressed air energy bills by more than 30%. Since compressed air is usually one of the largest energy expenses for a manufacturer using air-powered equipment, the survey represents a significant opportunity for energy savings.

Fortunately, finding and fixing compressed air leaks is a relatively simple and cost-effective process. Thanks to energy incentives provided by most energy suppliers—including Maintenance Holding BV.
And it doesn’t stop at finding air leaks. We also look for other gas leaks, like Nitrogen and others.
Monitoring VOC emissions survey

Volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are harmful to both health and the environment, so the management of risks associated with VOCs necessitates accurate and reliable monitoring. However, it is first necessary to distinguish between the two main areas of concern – indoor and outdoor VOCs, not the least because the definition of VOCs is different for these two applications.
What are the advantages of monitoring VOCs?
In addition to regulatory compliance, there are a host of other reasons for monitoring VOC emissions. For example, monitoring is often employed to measure and check abatement plant efficiency. Monitoring can also help to optimise process flows and can help to identify solvent reduction opportunities, which lower costs, improve environmental performance and reduce risks to workers. As such, monitoring forms an essential component of a solvent management programme.

As you can read, VOC monitoring has many uses and goals. Maintenance Holding BV only measures applications such as valves, safety valves, ... that send losses to the flare. In other words, often 100% loss. We detect these via ultrasonic or Acoustic emission. We make the calculation of each valve or safety valve, how much loss there is in litres/min so that the calculation can be made according to loss of Ton/year. This way you can prioritize the replacement of the leaking valves.