THE MAINTENANCE OF THINGS ASSET MANAGEMENT AND THE IIoT Glenn Johnson, Editor
The so-called fourth industrial revolution is promising enormous advantages in plant and asset reliability and uptime by making it possible to predict the future condition of assets before they fail.
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he transition from preventive maintenance to predictive maintenance will be enabled by increased amounts of data that is more accurate and that can be analysed to produce reliability predictions — avoiding unscheduled downtime and therefore improving the business bottom line. The impact of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) will be to help: • enhance asset performance • lower maintenance costs • improve asset reliability • enrich business performance. The IIoT, utilising collaboration with big data and cloud capabilities, will have a significant impact on asset management. It will become possible to gain insights into the real-time health of physical assets. IIoT provides enhanced connectivity within the plant, with more smartly connected devices, while ensuring a cheaper, less time-consuming and smoother data gathering process.
IIoT concepts The intention of the IIoT concept is to collect data from devices in the plant or in the field and then processes the data using sophisticated analytic software systems. Doing so is intended to enhance business processes and create operational improvements that were previously unavailable. However, achieving the transformational potential of the IIoT is not as simple as deploying so-called ‘smart’ plant technology. Getting significant benefits from the IIoT requires a collection of software, hardware, communications and networking technologies, all working together in a way that is optimised to the needs of the business. The IIoT concept is based around the more loosely defined Internet of Things (IoT) that is making itself known in the wider non-industrial world. For industrial organisations, there is some advantage already inherent in the nature of the wired and networked automation technology that is already found in process plants and factories. Industry already has standards for the
18 This issue is sponsored by — Schneider Electric — http://www.schneider-electric.com.au/en/work/campaign/wholesaler/reliability-of-supply.jsp