5 keys to prevent production downtime

You and your dedicated staff have all worked very hard to get your production levels to exactly where you want them to be - not an easy task, and certainly not an easy one to keep rolling without loads of serious challenges. Sure, every company has obstacles and set-backs here and there; but when it comes to production - one tiny hiccup can result in several factors of safety, profitability and even your organizations long-standing sustainability.

It's no secret that production downtime can be significant and negatively impact your operations very quickly.

These challenges happen with the blink of an eye - and cause long-standing times of downtime, lost profits and serious safety impacts. Here are five keys to prevent production downtime to help you remain up and running while keeping your people safer, profit margins up and maintaining your operations for a life-time of strong returns for generations.

Access to the right, actionable data analytics

Getting the right data; meaning not drowning in useless data that just streams in and makes a giant mess of your mind. I'm talking about the 'right' data - as in the kind of data that actually enables you and your people to know what they need to know - with in-depth diagnostics and exact levels of analytics so that each team member is getting the data from your operations that is relevant to their role; the finance people don't want to be getting alarms at 2am, and the Technicians don't need to get all the numbers.

Let's say Ed who is your number one go-to person for all things finance and number related gets all sorts of reports on field assets that he doesn't need, or honestly care about. It doesn't take Ed long to become annoyed at best with these data sets and mentally 'check-out' of them; but when Ed needs to know the financial impact of a decision he is faced with he shouldn't have to sift through all sorts of meaningless (to him) reports. We help you get Ed exactly what he needs for informative data when he needs it, no matter where Ed might be working from that day.

Now that Ed is sorted out; how about Maggie your rock star automation technician that's wanting to align what her priorities are for the day; what needs her immediate attention, and what can wait, and what doesn't need anything that day at all.

Does Maggie get a clear, understandable report telling her everything she needs to know without cluttering her down with financial reports? Let's hope so; because Maggie has a lot on her plate and many miles she may need to drive that day just to get to site. Hopefully the data she was presented gave her all the insights she needed to know to plan ahead and know exactly what tools and parts to bring so it isn't a wasted trip.

You, and all your amazing people need the right actionable data that is relevant to their role; nothing more, and nothing less.

Gain mobility and increase communications

Enabling your people to have access to your data no matter where they are, or what they're doing can drive super value to your operations avoiding downtime. Not only can you set up your alarms to each individual end user, but you can set thresholds for important makers that those select people need to be made immediately aware of then they happen.

You can also enter, monitor and manage your operations from our mobile app, Zedi Go. It was specifically built for operations and enables you and your people to view trends of recent performance, prioritize work, and can even automatically push data to other systems or custom reports. You can also manually input data change settings and issue commands saving you time by immediately updating systems. You can even create custom mobile forms to eliminate other field paperwork.

Creating open communications through data is an instant win to any organization trying to prevent downtime because it gets all your people that need to know, all on the same page of what's really going on at the site without actually being there. Data provides your people with the knowledge they need without getting things wrongly interpreted through several layers of people that can easily, but not intentionally misguide colleagues without all the right information. When everyone is working on the same near-real-time reporting it simplifies the process and give the foundation of your communications new strength that it may never have had before.

Proactive and in-depth diagnostics

The average cost of downtime across all businesses is $260,000 per hour* - then if you add it all up with the time involved to acquire the right people to fix things, figure out and then get the parts needed, the time to get there and then the time to actually fix the problem - wow, that adds up really fast and is pretty insane to wrap your head around; much less your budget, planning or long-term goals. It's not sustainable for your operations to require this kind of spend on anything that could be easily avoided with proactive measures in place.

With Emerson's Zedi Machine Health Monitoring in place you can securely connect to your critical assets that can located literally, well, anywhere and then acquire that asset data for accurate alarming to track, diagnose and protect machine health with expertly recommended preventative maintenance.

Together, with Emerson's Zedi IIoT platform and AMS Asset Monitor capabilities and managed by our highly trusted Emerson Impact Partners you can make online monitoring cost-effective for more industrial assets with an edge analytics device designed to deliver prediction and basic protection alongside process monitoring capabilities to the balance of assets in the plant. CHARMs-based technology collects both vibration and process variables and applies embedded auto analytics to alert personnel to the most common faults associated with a wide range of assets.

Some of these detection's include:

• Balance – imbalance
• Alignment – misalignment
• Looseness – mechanical looseness
• Blade Pass – bladed component issues
• Flow Turbulence – turbulence in pumps & rotating stall in fans
• Gear Faults – gear misalignment & cracked or broken tooth
• Tooth wear – worn tooth issue
• Bearing – mechanical bearing defects
• Lubrication – anti-friction bearing lubrication issues
• Oil whirl – bearing instability caused by oil whirls
• Air gap – inductive motor air gap problems
• Duty – instrumentation problems; Heat Exchanger
• Fouling – heat transfer coefficient; Heat Exchange

Laser focused people

We all know the dangers of driving while distracted, I hope. Take a ten thousand foot look at your operations and remove the drama and distraction of downtime; what do you see? Less stressed people, more profits, more production and far more long-term sustainability for your business.

I think we can all admit that when we're laser focused we can easily see the goal line, and the path to how to get there. No organizations has their people 100% of the time totally focused, but it's safe to say that when your people find that sweet-spot of focus, eye on the prize and have been granted the ability to take time-wasting tasks off their plate it quickly escalates to the most favorable outcomes even you can imagine.

When you work with Zedi Machine Monitoring you and your people can now gain a fresh perspective on your core business because preventative maintenance now becomes the 'norm' and downtime is almost unheard of compared to what your operations once dealt with on a daily, or weekly basis; wasting all that time and money - and most importantly wasted your people's focus. Remove the distraction of downtime; and you open the doors to people thriving and making spectacular gains in other, far more important areas of your business and operations.

Go with what you know - trust yourself

Understanding one of the most important things in life is knowing what you don't actually know. And as the old song goes something like 'know when to hold 'em, know when to fold 'em' - it's important to recognize that WHO you decide to partner with to help prevent downtime is one of the most important decisions about all of this you can make.

Are they reliable, are they forward thinking, are they flexible? All great questions to ask yourself on this quest to prevent downtime in your operations.

The Zedi IIoT platform is cloud-native; meaning it was 'born' in the cloud; not something slapped with bubble gum and taped together over time and then moved onto a cloud (hint; this is super important to your long-term success with industrial SaaS).

Our developers started in the cloud from day one designing our platform to ensure it's reliability and security as well as making it easy to use and understand. Because of this we also easily flex to grow with your organization, and do monthly updates to our system that you don't even need to reboot for; they just happen and you don't need to lift a finger.

We're also highly invested into our platform's future with a strong roadmap and long term upgrades in place. We're already doing some amazing work with AI and ML; you can check out our autonomous rod pump details here, or look at our work on pipeline anomalies here.

The point is we're on the fast track for bringing impactful tech to applications in production that actually make a giant impact on the success of operations; we don't build things just because we can; we build what matters the most to you and your operations to help increase your production, profits, safety and sustainability.