Unification & Optimization Through Remote Monitoring & Diagnostics

When discussing the benefits of a Remote Monitoring and Diagnostics (RM&D) strategy for your organization, we tend to focus on the obvious benefit of ready access to professional expertise (in this case asset condition monitoring and system health) who can deliver nearly real time asset health insights critical to making the best operational decisions. And while that is a vital and foundational role that RM&D plays in your organization’s condition monitoring strategy, numerous other benefits can come from adopting an RM&D solution. Some of those benefits might not be so obvious at first glance, so let’s take a look at some of the challenges that you can overcome with the help of Remote Monitoring & Diagnostic Service from Bently Nevada.

As was stated - and is universally understood - the chief benefit of an RM&D solution is the peace of mind it provides in the form of an off-site set of systems, data, and reliability professionals who can augment your current condition monitoring strategy. Should anything happen to your on-site, in-house solutions, having a remotely located system in place can go a long way towards extending your operational reach in the event of a localized problem. 

One of the arguably greater gains that RM&D brings to the table - that goes largely unnoticed - is that of unification. The idea of unification isn’t a new one and isn’t unique to the condition monitoring space, but it is a way of thinking that is making inroads into virtually every industry and discipline, and condition monitoring is proving to be one area that is ripe for this kind of revolutionary thinking.

Unification is the bringing of multiple, disparate systems and processes together, as a way to achieve a higher level of efficiency across multiple independent and sometimes siloed systems. Think of it as not just killing “two birds with one stone” but killing as many as possible, with one stone.

If you find your machinery assets governed by multiple asset health solutions, OEM or otherwise, you’re likely dealing with the very real issues that come up from such a patchwork of solutions. You will have systems that don’t communicate with each other efficiently, perhaps you have to manually combine multiple data sources and reports in order to create a snapshot of your location’s - to say nothing of your enterprise’s - overall machinery health. And while that in and of itself can be a headache, think about the greater implications of coverage “blindspots” not just in your systems and processes, which when not optimized may not be reporting all of your critical data in a timely and intuitive manner, but also think of the multiple points of failure in having your technicians monitor, gather, digest, analyze and report half a dozen or more independent systems. Why tolerate so many failure points in the coverage of your machinery health if you don’t have to? Before you object, hold that thought and read on.

Image

By unifying ALL of your condition monitoring needs into one solution, an RM&D solution from Bently Nevada fills those gaps while shining a light on those blind spots, empowering your people to deliver accurate, confident, data-based assessments of your asset health while unburdening them from repetitive tasks that take them away from the job you hired them for. All of this while, you know, reducing your costs, streamlining your systems, and achieving a greater level of coverage and control of your condition monitoring strategy.

Beyond just bringing processes together under one solution, you can also break down departmental silos thus bringing an end to “operational fragmentation” with an all-encompassing RM&D solution. How? Think about it. If your assets are governed by multiple condition monitoring systems, you likely have team members divided up to take care of various groups of assets, likely organized by application. Your team members will naturally gravitate towards assets that fall under one or two applications, which means there could be other machines and systems they spend far less time interacting with. This leads to silos where one team has a specialized skillset focused on a narrow portion of your asset population, and they will have less in common, less interaction, and fewer insights, into the other assets, other teams, and the other condition monitoring strategies that govern those assets. This is a recipe for disaster that can be easily avoided by unifying your asset health systems under one solution, one vendor, one system. When you unite all of these disparate processes, solutions, and team members by way of a single-source RM&D solution, you gain multiple “efficiency wins” across your entire organization. Now you can still have team members assigned to various machinery assets, but they will intuitively understand how to help in other areas when the need arises as they will be working within the same ecosystem. That’s unification at its finest.

Additionally, unification brings about a default degree of optimization by virtue of process streamlining. But there are other optimization benefits that come from an effective RM&D solution. Let’s look at some of those.

Independent of the benefits associated with unification, RM&D brings your organization several benefits from a pure optimization front. Some of those benefits, in no particular order, are:

• Reduced travel costs - By leveraging an RM&D solution, you can have technology in place that negates the need for techs to travel to a location for routine or lower-tier issues.  By being able to monitor and diagnose a remotely located asset, you increase that assets’ profitability immensely, as well as keep your team members off the road and at home with their families - a true win-win. And with 7 dedicated remote monitoring centers (RMCs)around the globe, including our newest location in Brazil [/linkto], you can rest assured that there is an RM&D team near you (or your remote assets) that can be deployed at a moment’s notice - for less than it would cost to deploy your in-house team.

• Increased safety - By extending the range of your early warning window, you exponentially decrease your chances of experiencing a catastrophic failure with one of your assets that could result in dangerous environments for your team members and those living near your operations. Additionally, by reducing the amount of time spent physically inspecting and maintaining your machinery assets, you reduce your team member’s exposure to potentially harmful situations. 

• Always Updated Infrastructure - For operations that cannot afford the costs associated with a 100% on-premise condition monitoring solution, employing an RM&D solution that includes an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Software-as-a-Service component (SaaS), like Bently HOST, guarantees that they will have the latest technology tasked with monitoring their assets, with upgrades to both next-gen condition monitoring and diagnostic software and advanced analytics tools covered by the cost of your subscription. When you consider the costs associated with researching, procuring, implementing, upgrading, updating, maintaining, and ultimately replacing these critical tools and systems, the costs associated with an RM&D Bently HOST subscription begins to make sense - to say nothing of the quality of life you will bring to your IT department, who will be thanking you for such a move.

• Flexibility & Scalability - Your production needs fluctuate. Unfortunately, when you buy and operate in-house, on-premise solutions, you have to buy for “high-water marks” when it comes to being able to handle the condition monitoring needs of your fleet of machinery assets. With an RM&D solution, you can scale up or down depending on your needs at any given point in time, without having to worry about unused (and paid for) software licenses, hardware, and personnel. 

• Skillset Optimization/Augmentation - Do you have technicians and operators who can manage your assets, but no “data gurus” to make actionable, accurate insights into your machinery health? Or do you have the analysts, but lack the personnel to deploy and maintain the assets on-site? You can augment and optimize your current team’s skillsets by adding an RM&D solution that allows for expert analysis of your data, or a highly-skilled implementation team to help you get your condition monitoring systems up and running, and even a dedicated team devoted to monitoring your assets either remotely or on-site.

Image

• Remote Training - And when you need to upgrade your existing team’s skillsets, with our newly revamped, fully remote enabled coursework, you can bring your team up to speed on the latest in condition monitoring without having to send them across the globe for specialized training. In fact, we can even arrange to have the hardware in question shipped to you, set up, and optimized so that your team can interact with it during training. 

• Smarter Systems - Your systems can benefit from the power of machine learning by applying specialized, templated monitoring profiles that can be scaled across your entire enterprise and as they run, your systems will learn from the data that is constantly coming in, making your systems smarter, less reactive, and more predictive, thus optimizing your overall condition monitoring system and freeing up your specialized talent to focus on bigger things.

So how do we help you to attain all of these various benefits associated with unification and optimization via a Remote Monitoring and Diagnostics solution? We start by offering a wide range of solutions, which can be grouped into four pathways. Based on your needs and preferences, we can:

• Help you with your condition monitoring needs to whatever degree you desire
• Train you to handle your condition monitoring needs
• Fill expertise and/or resource capacity gaps associated with your condition monitoring needs from implementation to remote monitoring, remote training, even global team deployment
• Do it all for you from implementation to monitoring, analysis, upgrades, reporting, and problem resolution

So, are there real-world examples of how all of this works to support organizations like yours? Of course. Here are just two you can click on to learn more about how RM&D can support your condition monitoring team, solving the most unique problems to your industry, be that industrial, pulp and paper, power generation, chemical, and oil and gas.

Bently Nevada Remote Services Win During COVID-19 Outbreak in Europe

Petronas Recognizes Bently Nevada for Remote Training with “New Ways of Working” Award

Through cutting-edge solutions such as Remote Monitoring & Diagnostics, Remote Training, and Bently HOST, we’re making sure your condition monitoring operations are running at their best, all the time, with oversight from some of the best and brightest in the industry. 

With over 500 service and support professionals in over 50 countries, over 150 certified machinery diagnostic engineers, and over 6 million monitoring points installed on more than 300,000 monitoring devices globally, Bently Nevada is perfectly situated to help you achieve both unification and optimization of your condition monitoring strategies through RM&D.

For more than 60 years, we’ve created and supplied condition monitoring products that can be found in many of the world’s leading industrial applications. Customers turn (and return) to us for a simple reason: lasting value. Our solutions demonstrate their worth, day in and day out. We combine the highest quality products and responsive customer support with a service team that takes the time to understand the uniqueness of your plant, your personnel, and your goals.

If you’d like to learn more about how Bently Nevada can help you achieve a proactive, plant-wide condition-based maintenance (CBM) program that incorporates the perfect blend of Remote Monitoring & Diagnostics, Remote Training, Remote Services, and Bently HOST, please don’t hesitate to contact us and we’ll set up a time to discuss your asset health monitoring needs.