Electricity + Control April 2019

CONTROL SYSTEMS + AUTOMATION + SYSTEMS ENGINEERING

Condition monitoring in consumer products plants Staying competitive in production requires businesses to offer the highest quality product and to discover untapped efficiencies across the production process to reduce costs. incur technical resource support burdens and may enable only partial operational transparency. Cus- tom-analytics applications can strain companies be- cause employees have to build, maintain and keep the applications relevant to the evolving process. Compounding these challenges, varying non-stand- ard communications protocols between legacy hardware and new equipment require continuous allocation of technical resources. Dependencies between core enterprise systems and the in-house analytics applications can limit the frequency with which maintenance and analytical improvements are made to fine-tune algorithms to get actionable results without significant operational costs. As an alternative to in-house platforms and ap- plications, companies can take advantage of Mind- Sphere, a cloud-based, open Internet ofThings (IoT) operating system, to keep costs low. Offered as a ‘platform as a service’ (PaaS), MindSphere enables customers to offset the costs of IT infrastructure, programming tools and analytics services as oper- ational expenses with minimal or no infrastructure

U nplanned downtime from disruptive asset failure is a constant challenge and puts pressure on profitability in the manufac- turing industry. It stems from lack of transparen- cy into machine performance required to predict and prevent failures on the factory floor or across plants. One way companies can minimise the risk of unplanned asset failure and damage is by condi- tion monitoring through digitalisation. Condition monitoring monitors a specific asset’s parameters, including alarms and notifications on key performance indicators (KPIs), for anomalies against defined control ranges to provide perfor- mance transparency and inform when assets need to be inspected. Monitoring requires accurate and continuous input data from a variety of sensors and parameters in real, or near real, time. Digitalisation is changing the industry landscape by opening the door to more advanced analytics and data collection directly from the shop floor. Cur- rently, some manufacturers perform predictive an- alytics using customised in-house applications that

Take Note!

1. Condition monitoring monitors a specific asset’s parameters for anomalies against defined control ranges to provide perfor- mance transparency. 2. As an alternative to in- house platforms and applications, companies can take advantage of a cloud-based open IoT operating system to keep costs low and benefit from established IT expertise. 1 2

6 Electricity + Control

APRIL 2019