CONTROL Special Report:
Ten Steps to Avoid Unnecessary Plant Shutdowns
Do you have nightmares about emergency shutdowns? Are you worried that some of your important systems and equipment are always on the ragged edge of failure? Welcome to the club. You aren’t alone. With the downsizing of operations and the loss of much institutional knowledge in process automation, it is a rare plant that has enough manpower and knowhow to keep the place running the way it should.
Downtime. Preventive Maintenance. Emergency Shutdowns. All of these cost big money. Not only do the repairs cost more, after a failure in equipment or instrumentation, but the real cost is that the plant can’t make product. I was once told by a plant manager in the specialty chemicals industry that every hour his plant was down reduced his output by three-quarters of a million dollars. Compared to just one instance of an unplanned shutdown, the cost of maintenance and upgrades is miniscule.
Increasing productivity is the only way we can keep our industrial infrastructure open in the face of significant cost differentials in other parts of the world. Installing plant automation has been the road to increasing productivity for decades. Now the return from additional automation is less, and we are turning to other ways to increase productivity.
Clearly, one of the most important ways to increase productivity is to keep the plant operating more of the time. This is called plant availability. Plant availability is critical to keeping your plant open and your workers employed.
Here are ten steps to increasing plant availability and avoiding unnecessary shutdowns. These are important steps, but aren’t necessarily the only ones you can take. But if you do take these steps, you will see improved productivity and plant availability immediately, and you will also see some additional steps you need to take.
Each of these steps has a proven ROI, and these articles have been chosen to illustrate how and why to implement each step, and help you calculate the ROI from doing so. And don’t forget to figure out how many unplanned shutdowns you are avoiding and crank those into the ROI value.
Walt Boyes
Editor in Chief
Ten Steps to Avoid Unnecessary Plant Shutdowns
Step One: Move to Reliability-Centered Maintenance
Center on Reliability – Forget preventive maintenance. Today's uptime requirements call for an entirely different approach. Rich Merritt, Senior Technical Editor
Step Two: Prevent Failure with Condition Monitoring
Prevent Failure – Emerging sensor and analysis technologies let operations personnel foresee and correct problems before equipment goes down. Dan Hebert, PE, Senior Technical Editor
Step Three: Optimize Redundant Controls
The Best Defense – In the Field and on the Plant Floor, Redundancy Protects and Secures Critical Processes. Dan Hebert, PE, Senior Technical Editor
Step Four: Monitor Power Quality
How and Why to Monitor Power – Quantity, quality, and reliability of this expensive raw material can make or break your plant's bottom line. Rich Merritt, Technical Editor
Step Five: Rationalize Your AlarmSystems
How to Perform Alarm Rationalization – This critical part of alarm management is key to improved plant safety, environmental responsibility, and operations excellence. Bill Mostia Jr., PE
Step Six: Upgrade Your Legacy Systems
SPEAK! New Tricks to Get Information Out of Legacy Systems – How to retrofit your system for modern communications. Rich Merritt, Technical Editor
Step Seven: Connect Diagnostics from Your Smart Transmitters
State of the HART – The Compelling Case For the Most Used Digital Communications Protocol in The World. Ron Helson
Step Eight: Keep Your Safety Systems Updated and Operating
The Safety Instrumented Function: An S-Word Worth Knowing – Understand the SIF to control confusion, complexity, and cost of Safety Instrumented Systems. Bill Mostia Jr., PE
Step Nine: Do Loop Performance Analysis
TiO2 Facility Finds Hidden Plant – Millennium Inorganic Chemicals increased capacity, improved quality, and reduced maintenance costs with loop performance analysis. Paul Berwanger
Step Ten: Install Better Online Process Analyzers
Steam Cracker Performance Optimized by Process MRA – Magnetic resonance analysis gives BASF AG a consistent, low-maintenance method to accommodate fluctuating feedstocks. John Edwards
THE ONLINE RESOURCE OF CONTROL MAGAZINE
THE DIGITAL RESOURCE OF PHARMACEUTICAL MANUFACTURING MAGAZINE
THE DIGITAL RESOURCE OF PLANT SERVICES MAGAZINE
THE DIGITAL RESOURCE OF CHEMICAL PROCESSING MAGAZINE
THE DIGITAL RESOURCE OF FOOD PROCESSING MAGAZINE
THE DIGITAL RESOURCE OF CONTROL DESIGN MAGAZINE
--------------------------
Tänkvärda saker.
Send Email