Manufacturing companies are continually striving to achieve and maintain a high level of operational excellence. Operational excellence requires continual improvement of a company’s manufacturing operations, driving them to become increasingly lean and agile.

To meet the goals of operational excellence, manufacturers must be able to fully utilize the information in all of their control and information systems. Achieving this level of utilization requires the ability to easily integrate these disparate control and information systems. Significant advances supporting these information exchange requirements have been made in recent years in the application areas of advanced process control, finite scheduling, asset management, statistical process control and supply chain integration. However the integration of Operations and Maintenance (O&M) related information has lagged behind these other areas of information exchange. This situation limits the opportunities to make important business operating decisions that are dependent upon integrated O&M information.

In today’s world of interdependent supply chain partners and O&M outsourcing models, the limitations also have significant implications that reach beyond the bounds of any single enterprise into the extended enterprises they are part of with their various collaboration partners.

In a more practical scenario, this problem could be easily represented by an unexpected equipment failure during the execution of a planned production order. It is clear that this is going to impact operations in the enterprise. However, that same impact is now propagating up and down the entire supply chain with potential financial implications including penalty costs and loss of business.

This document explains how three industry organizations, MIMOSA, the OPC Foundation, and the ISAs SP95 Committee are working together to provide the process industries the capability to openly and securely exchange O&M information.

So how do you justify your Condition Monitoring (CM) program? Number of saves? Less downtime than last year, or do you use more sophisticated terms like Return on Investment (ROI). If you`re looking at this article to provide another way to calculate savings based on an event that might never have happened, then I suggest you stop reading now.

So how do we financially justify CM? What role does it play in the ‘enterprise’? The detailed answers to these and a thorough review of the solution are beyond the space allotted here. However, back in May of 1998, John Mitchell, President of MIMOSA wrote a paper focusing on EVA; (Producer Value Model as he describes the term) as a model for optimizing equipment asset management. This article simply tries to summarize some of his points and I encourage you to download the entire article.

It’s hard to believe that it’s been almost one year since I first set out to write this series of articles. While not as popular (and profitable) as J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (anyone with a pre-teen son or daughter will appreciate the reference), it has nonetheless been an enjoyable exercise. Many thanks for the continued requests for reprints, feedback, general support and most of all to Coxmoor Publishing for providing the forum. We’ll begin with a short synopsis (quiz at the end)…

I began this quest by searching for the reasons why CM is not as fast a growing industry or practice, as many of us would believe it to be, or better yet, could be. In my first article I suggested that the problem is not with the tradeshows, economy, etc., rather with the implementation and acceptance of CM in general. I pointed to the lack of CM information being integrated within the enterprise and the ‘decision support systems’ used to sustain them. This lack of integration is unfortunately a two-way street, i.e. process and finance information are rarely an integral part of the CM program. Following this theme, I suggested that CM programs need to be measured by the same financial metrics used to quantify the process. In essence, I suggested that CM needs to be recognized as a value-added asset, differentiating the company, product or process through increased availability, yield and quality. Otherwise, I believe CM (and the maintenance organization in general) will remain a cost item subject to the cost-reduction cycle we are all too familiar with…

My previous article received a lot of positive feedback. I am glad to see that as an industry we are concerned with our future based on our knowledge of the past!

One reader responded by saying: “In my opinion, the [production] companies that win will be the companies that can fully integrate economic, condition assessment, maintenance and planning into their corporate structure. Those companies will have to stop looking for scapegoats, and will have to start looking at how they can fully utilize their resources.”

Another reader responded with: “Where do you find operators who actually give a damn about a machine’s condition or who really wish to know? Our operators do 12 hour shifts for three days then have two or three days off. With this type of shift work, there is little continuity… I think we have to completely rethink how processes are monitored, controlled, and maintained.”

Both of these comments point to a common theme of how do we better utilize the information we have about a machine’s condition, and integrate this information with the process [and culture].

What is the Machinery Information Management Open Systems Alliance (MIMOSA) and why should you care? MIMOSA is an alliance that enables Enterprise Asset Optimization resulting from the productized integration of building, plant and equipment data into and with Enterprise Business Information. Users, vendors and integrators of maintenance related technology should care, because their future is dependent on their ability to integrate and communicate effectively with the enterprise. This paper briefly explores the history, present and potential future of maintenance technology and practices in the context of enterprise business strategies and the enterprise information infrastructure.

During the past decade, many industrial manufacturing organizations have implemented condition monitoring programs on production machinery. The objective is to track various condition and performance measurements related to a specific machine (or component of a machine, e.g., electric motor) over time in order to deduce pending machine failures.

By taking proactive action to avoid unscheduled production downtime, these organizations expect to reduce the costs of maintenance, direct labor, and waste related to the conversion of raw materials into finished goods. Such action presupposes a capability to diagnose pending failures within a sufficient lead time (depending on the contemplated action). However, development of condition monitoring technology has, in the past, focused on diagnostic aspects rather than on predicting residual machine life.

The OpenO&M Initiative is an effort by multiple industry standards organizations to provide a harmonized set of information standards for the exchange of Operations & Maintenance (O&M) data and associated context. The OpenO&M Initiative is an open, collaborative, effort composed of diverse groups of subject matter experts organized in industry specific Joint Working Groups (JWG) that are focused on enabling O&M applications interoperability for manufacturing plants, fleets and facilities.

OpenO&M is a virtual organization, maintained by MIMOSA, which serves as an umbrella for collaboration. There are no dues, with individual participants volunteering from participating standards groups and other groups are encouraged to join. Members of the group strive to incorporate the OpenO&M work into the standards they represent. Key current members of the OpenO&M Manufacturing JWG include:

MIMOSA – Asset management related information standards
OPC Foundation – Data transport standards
SP95 – ISA’s Enterprise-Control System Integration Standards Committee
WBF – B2MML (Business To Manufacturing Markup Language)

The introduction of ecologically clean resourse-keeping technology is the main demand of modern production especially in dangerous branches of industry such as oil-gas-refining, oil-chemical etc. It’s impossible to imagine oil-chemical production without reliable accident-free work of technological equipment.

By means of computer monitoring COMPACS system we provide fundamentally new level of safe processes and machine maintenance based on the latest information technologies, saving large financial and personnel resourses.

The starting point for improving maintenance planning is the establishment of a maintenance policy which embraces a work flow system, various techniques in monitoring reliability and work practices, and anticipates plant problems rather than reacts to them. This means that the company has a commitment to sustaining an information base which requires accurate data collection, effective management and timely disbursement of reports. The planning has to be reasonable, considering the level of available resources and the speed with which they may be dispatched.

A maintenance improvement strategy is presented in this paper which has been applied in a number of companies, with each of its elements tested for individual effectiveness and for its contribution to the whole program. It focuses on two key issues: the operations/maintenance interface, and the need for detailed technical information on the condition of equipment to optimise maintenance decision making. The strategy has three early elements: an audit, a workshop for combined operations and maintenance personnel and a preliminary roll-out of tasks. The strategy fits within a cohesive model which has three principal lobes: condition-based maintenance, strategic planning and optimisation for operations scheduling.