Deepen and Broaden Your Expertise Through Remote Monitoring & Diagnostics
With the state of the world such as it is, we’re finding that now, more than ever, the ability to move as much of your organizational processes to a remote environment is not just safer, but many organizations are finding that the change makes better business sense, both from a logistical and financial perspective.
With restrictions in travel not just due to legislative decisions, but also due to illness among your personnel, and side-effects that make travel less than ideal to impossible, the ability to remotely monitor your critical and essential machinery is more valuable than ever before. Additionally, access to the industry-leading machinery insights will fit together nicely with your local team’s knowledge of your systems, adding real-world value that enables your organization to not just stay on top of your asset management programs, but also to enable immediate and actionable maintenance plans that can save you thousands in unplanned outages, equipment failures, or worse.
- Various operations are fragmented across the organization, even across specific sites
- Expert personnel may be centralized and not available at every plant location which can result in increased downtime windows and costs associated with dispatching a machinery expert if travel is even an option
- The number of machinery diagnostics experts is decreasing, with many approaching retirement
- This leaves your critical machinery exposed to greater risk from inexperienced personnel
One of the key benefits of our software hosting, remote monitoring and machinery diagnostics programs is how you can emulate a deeper and wider-spread workforce by augmenting your in-house operations with the knowledge and insights of the Bently Nevada team.
In many organizations, there are only a handful of multi-skilled maintenance professionals that have the ability and experience to make critical maintenance decisions - and many of them are centrally located, perhaps at the largest plant, but not conveniently located to other plants that may present regular maintenance challenges. Those skilled professionals, by the way, aren’t growing in numbers. In manufacturing alone, 50% of the workforce is forecasted to retire in the next ten years with 25% of the current workforce eligible for retirement now. Therefore, organizations must adapt and find new ways to extend the expertise of their teams, both from a depth of knowledge point of view and from a location point of view. Through the use of intuitive technology backed by accurate and relevant data, Our Remote Monitoring & Diagnostic teams can collect vital data from your individual machines and locations, analyze that data and apply our expertise to deliver insight-driven action plans and remote support. Armed with these insights and expert advice, your maintenance teams are then empowered to act on any plant-specific issue in a timely, cost-saving manner.
By instituting an Support Services Agreement (SSA) with Bently Nevada for Remote Monitoring & Diagnostics, you can not only immediately upgrade the pool of knowledge and experience available to your organization, you will gain direct access to Bently Nevada global experts at your disposal around the clock, with the ability to diagnose and advise on asset health anywhere around the globe.
As an option, Bently Nevada also offers Bently HOST†. Bently Host combines the delivery of Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS -the servers, networking and storage) with Software as a Service (SaaS - our System 1 software offered as a subscription) into a single, secure offering. This allows businesses to fully leverage the advantages of big data to increase their reliability and availability with a decrease in maintenance costs and lost production revenues. Effective condition monitoring is no longer only available to those with large IT budgets and resources. Using Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) capabilities, any business with critical assets can realize the complete value of their monitoring equipment, creating an increase in efficiency without a high investment. Proactive, data-driven protection enables smarter decisions to protect assets, improve safety and avoid downtime.
You’ll appreciate, and we’re proud to share, that when you employ Remote Monitoring & Diagnostics from Bently Nevada, you’ll get:
- Over 500 service and support professionals in over 50 countries
- Over 160 certified machinery diagnostic engineers across the globe
- The insights and experience that comes from having installed over 6 million monitoring points on more than 300,000 assets globally over the past 60 years.
Aside from the expertise injection and global reach, you can also enjoy:
- Peace of Mind - By running your operations with increased efficiency and reduced instances of downtime, all with the knowledge that you have an entire team of industry-leading experts at your disposal, you can enjoy the peace of mind that Bently Nevada Remote Monitoring & Diagnostic partners have been enjoying for years.
- Early Warning Detection - Closely related to getting more peace of mind, the benefits of having a suite of software alarms configured and monitored by system experts really manifests itself when you get alerted to issues before they are even classified as “issues”. When an alarm is triggered, our team of experts can diagnose if the alarm is a result of a machinery or instrumentation issue, how to investigate and resolve the issue, or if further action is needed. The sooner you know about these things, the more time you have to plan, to digest the data and insights, and draft up an action plan to address the issue(s) in a cost effective and timely manner.
- Decreased Maintenance Costs - Simple math really, but when you increase the reliability of your machinery by way of deeper insights and farther-reaching data, you increase its availability, which means you spend less time in maintenance and repair states.
- Technical Guidance - With insights and advice from the world leader in condition monitoring, you can be confident when determining whether or not to execute or defer scheduled maintenance.
We start off by setting up a baseline, then institute a monitoring and diagnostic protocol that informs us where optimization and tuning can be deployed. Finally, we take your data and analyze it, converting that raw data into actionable, data-backed reports that you can share with your organization.
It’s great to talk about how well a system works, but the loudest voice, the one that carries the most weight, is the one that has actually experienced the value of a given system. So with that in mind, we’d like to share two customer success stories that we feel really outline the real-world value that a Remote Monitoring & Diagnostic package from Bently Nevada can bring to your own organization.
1. The first one comes to us by way of a wind farm customer who had a 1.8MW wind turbine that was showing periodic vibration and an increasing trend in Stage 2 SER Pinion Fault 2X parameter that exceeded the customer’s existing warning and alarm setpoints. Thanks to our collection and analysis of high-resolution spectrum plots, we were able to observe the shift from minimal sideband activity around GMF peaks that eventually built up to increased sideband amplitudes between GMF harmonics. Armed with this data, we advised the client to perform a borescope inspection of the gearbox which led to the discovery of a fractured tooth on the intermediate shaft pinion, with no damage observed on any of the other gears. Thanks to these targeted insights and minimally-invasive inspection procedures, the unit was able to be repaired up-tower at a significant saving compared to an entire gearbox replacement, which, were it misdiagnosed could have resulted in an in-service failure resulting in a gearbox failure. In this single instance, the savings were estimated to be in the neighborhood of at least $100,000 USD.
2. Another example comes to us from a customer operating a steam turbine power plant, they had reached out to Bently Nevada’s Remote Monitoring & Diagnostic Center for help determining the cause of a trip one of their steam turbines had experienced during start-up, a start-up that had followed a forced outage. By having access to the machinery data, our RM&D team was able to determine the source of the trip, which turned out to be the fault of incorrectly configured Differential expansion instruments. Our services personnel were then able to guide the client through the process of successfully bypassing the faulty instrumentation, getting the turbine back up in just four hours. Keep in mind, this originated after normal business hours, and yet the Bently Nevada RM&D team was both 1) ready to take the call, and 2) immediately able to formulate a plan based on our data and insights. Our customer estimated that they saved at least $40,000 USD in additional downtime thanks to the accurate and immediate response from the Bently Nevada Remote Monitoring & Diagnostic team.
Of course, all of this is moot if it doesn’t work for your organization, so we’ve created multiple packages support options ranging from core services to advanced package, and our premier option which offers you the best possible remote monitoring & diagnostic solution on the market.
Here are some of the details that our various packages offer:
- Software alarm tuning: review, change, implement, configure applicable software states, and software alarms.
- Software reference data optimization: enhancement of system functionality based on historical machinery behavior and establishing reference data for future comparisons; assures the correct data is captured at the correct times and displayed in the correct formats.
- Baseline health audit report: includes a full review of available vibration and process data for all ranges of operating conditions, with a report on any machinery, system, or instrument anomalies.
- System health checks: a review and assessment of server health, System 1 condition monitoring software health, and vibration protection/monitoring systems health.
- Server health includes operating system hard drive usage, System 1 database hard drive usage, CPU usage, reviews of both application event log and system health log
- System 1 health includes data acquisition status, System 1 version status, database back-up status, and data store span, consumption, size, age, and health
- Vibration protection/monitoring system health includes hardware configuration status, software version status, firmware version status, and instrument health
- Periodic alarm & event report: summary of the review, investigation, and documentation of A&E occurrences on a periodic basis. This is available for hosted, connected and non-connected System 1 customers. The report is supplemented by a conference call to discuss the findings and update the statuses of the cases.
- Machine health audit report: comprehensive review of data associated with the operation of a machine train over a period of time in order to detect and track changes in the machine behavior and to provide early detection and warning of developing malfunctions. Report provides recommended actions to investigate, resolve, and/or mitigate the issues.
- Onsite visits: periodic site visits by a certified field engineer to review and assess the health of the Bently Nevada hardware and software.
- Alarm and event management: implementation and management of software alarms within their condition monitoring software to proactively manage machinery assets. Alarm conditions are evaluated to detect and diagnose instrumentation and machinery problems before they reach a serious condition.
We are in the ultimate challenging scenario right now, which affords forward-thinking organizations a unique opportunity to look at ways in which they can improve their current organizational processes overall and take advantage of ways to enhance their current asset health programs in anticipation of future production events.
If you would like to learn more about Bently Nevada’s Remote Monitoring & Diagnostic options on your own, we have the following resources available:
Additionally, please feel free to contact your sales manager to schedule a time to discuss what a Remote Monitoring & Diagnostics plan can do for your condition monitoring program, or you can contact us here link and download our latest whitepaper- Going remote: condition monitoring for a distributed workforce.
90% - Typical reduction in non-actionable alarms and events
$1MM - savings per day attributed to proper condition monitoring from lost productivity, secondary processes, and equipment damage
500-1000% - typical difference in cost between an unplanned, reactive outage compared to the cost of a planned maintenance
The Most Important Upgrade for Your Entire Enterprise – PEOPLE