Reliability 28 FEATURE
Reliability-centred services cut maintenance costs
As ABB prepares to release new survey results, which will reveal the high cost of outages in industry, along with the perceptions and trends of maintenance and reliability, Virve Viitanen, the company’s Global Head of Customer Care and Support for Motion Services, explains how reliability-centred services can help businesses save 40% or more on maintenance costs.
ABB ACS800 converters are utilised in 24 wind turbines at Enefit Green's Aulepa and Aseri wind farms in the Baltic region.
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he risk landscape that industrial enterprises are navigating in 2023 is complex, volatile and distinctly lacking the one thing that almost every business craves – certainty. As inflation cuts into margins and profits, budgets are being squeezed and efficiencies sought. For example, businesses are now, more than ever, looking to reduce unplanned asset downtime that has a negative effect on both productivity and output. In very simple terms, reliability-centred services are all about increasing uptime. To maximise uptime, customers should consider a range of recovery and/ or planned data and advisory services designed to meet their unique service and maintenance needs with the key objective of preventing downtime. The financials involved with unplanned downtime are serious – it accounts for up to 20% of the overall cost of a facility’s operation. According to ABB calculations, in the food and beverage sector, for example, downtime can cost from $4,000 - $30,000 per hour, which becomes a very substantial amount when you consider that up to 12 hours can be lost in a single incident if cleanup operations are required. Paper
Quarter 4 2023
producers, meanwhile, lose up to $25,000 every hour when a key asset breaks down, with the steel industry averaging around $300,000 in losses per critical machine failure. As well as the direct costs associated with wasted materials, replacement parts, labour, cleanups, loss of production, logistics disruption and restarting processes, downtime also presents businesses with several indirect costs. These include reputational damage, health and safety risks, loss of team morale, insurance premium rises and inventory management shakeups. INVESTING IN RELIABILITY Having spent 17 years inside ABB, I have seen first hand how the industrial technology landscape has evolved as well as how our industry is looking at new operating models, both with the aim of maximising uptime. Technology is enhancing the value of reliability-centred services. Digital solutions such as augmented reality (AR) are unlocking opportunities to collaborate with customers virtually through remote installation, commissioning and general support. Service engineers can carry out
remote assessments on demand, providing speedier resolutions that help to reduce downtime, costs and health and safety risks. Meanwhile, connecting assets and tracking their performance is enabling a shift towards predictive maintenance informed by data. This triggers early interventions and helps to prevent failures from occurring. This approach, also known as condition-based monitoring, is helping to transform maintenance operations across a range of industrial sectors. Last year in Guangdong, China, ABB digitally connected 34 critical motors of various pumps, fans and mixers at the Zhuhai power plant, a two-unit 600MW coal-fired power plant that produces 3.9 billion kWh of electricity annually. The site’s desulfurisation plant had experienced unplanned downtime due to motor failures, resulting in power interruptions for the city of Zhuhai. The condition monitoring solution enables the customer to monitor operational variables and health indicators remotely, avoiding this risk by collecting data on key parameters from the motors. This allows early intervention when needed and has significantly increased uptime, saved costs and increased employee safety > 30 www.theaemt.com