Process Industries
Maximizing plant up time and cutting costs are not just objectives... they are a way of life!
Your Challenge
Business today demands maximum plant up time. To achieve it, process problems must be solved before they impact safety, the environment, regulatory compliance, or product quality; and the penalties for non-compliance keeping increasing. Somehow, you have to keep up with these demands with fewer people, who have less direct experience.
Your Environment
- You operate complex plants with sophisticated, interacting systems.
- Confounding problems appear at odd times and with unusual symptoms, wreaking havoc on the production schedule.
- Your 24/7, cross-functional operations make it difficult to share troubleshooting knowledge.
- You're often sure that the current problem has occurred before, but there is no easy way to find out and the people in your organization who would know the answer are not on shift.
- Many of your best trouble-shooters have retired or been recruited by competitors.
- Pressure to get the unit back in service often means resorting to expensive "Trial & Error" parts swapping.
- Yet executive management expects you to squeeze more from the plant assets, with less.
The Solution
The solution is SpotLight, a guided diagnostic system that uses real world experience to steer maintenance staff as they troubleshoot, and then points them to the appropriate repair procedure once the root cause is identified.
The SpotLight field service system has two main parts:
- The expert troubleshooting software application, developed by CaseBank, delivers expert diagnostic guidance for solving equipment and process problems.
- The custom knowledgebase of diagnostic and repair information built by specialized knowledgebase development staff, using your maintenance experience and expertise.
SpotLight can help:
- Reduced repeat attempts to fix the same problem.
- Improve early symptom identification for safer conditions.
- Automate knowledge sharing between departments and/or plants for better decision making.
- Reduce the number and duration of process upsets for less downtime.
- Reduce resource and training costs by,
- Shortening the learning curve for new staff,
- Reducing diagnostic time, and
- Increasing average diagnostic knowledge and quality of response.
- Shortening the learning curve for new staff,
Contact us today to discuss how.
SpotLight And Industrial Processing
A large multi-national plastics company 1997: A young operator was working the weekend shift. He noticed that the extruder was making an unusually loud whining noise, and he thought that the noise was slowly getting louder throughout the day.
SpotLight showed several possible causes, but one of them was highlighted as a "Red Flag". A Red Flag problem is one that could develop into catastophic consequences if left unresolved for long. He called his boss and read the solution to him, whereupon he came into work and applied the vibration analysis test equipment.
The vibration signature appeared to match the one shown in the SpotLight solution, and so a decision was made to shut down the line and investigate further. Sure enough, they discovered what SpotLight had suspected - that a bevel gear in the extruder drive was starting to work itself loose. The gear was secured and the line restarted within two hours.
A good resolution to that problem. By contrast, that SpotLight solution came from a hard experience back in 1972, where the line was kept running until the gear failed, resulting in massive damage to the machinery, three days of downtime, and overtime for a full complement of maintenance workers working around the clock. Not this time, though - SpotLight allowed them to benefit from their experience.