The plant has a “when it rains, it pours” problem with unscheduled downtime. The plant engineer came onboard three months ago and is puzzled because at other plants where he’s worked, the unplanned downtime had an even distribution.
After discussion with the plant electrical engineer, the plant engineer submitted a capital request for a power monitoring system. The idea was to identify root cause power anomalies at the service and all feeders so that mitigation measures would be based on actual data. The request was turned down, so he submitted a new, less ambitious request for a basic system.
What else might he do to get data?
The power monitoring system is probably the best first move. However, it’s far from the only source of data. He needs to leverage the power of the CMMS, and to do that he’ll need to:
- Get predictive data into the system. Vibration monitoring, thermography, insulation resistance testing, and other testing provide this.
- Use the CMMS to trend PM condition measurements, thus giving them predictive power.
- Classify and correlate repair data from each downtime incident. The patterns that this can enable him to see in CMMS reports should reveal where at least a few of the common trouble sources are.
- Compare failure dates of equipment with PM dates of that equipment. Is there a correlation?
