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Managing Health of Your Assets at Multiple Locations with Intelligent System Controls

As time goes by, businesses that rely on their assets face increasing reliability issues. Problems such as sudden downtimes and unplanned maintenance can significantly drain a company’s resources and undermine its safety. Hence, businesses in every industry require a reliable solution to manage the health of their assets.

Posted on 04-Feb-2022

However, they only have so much time, money, and expertise within their team to focus on all critical elements of their day-to-day operation. Therefore, it’s no surprise many companies have experienced first-hand how manual asset health monitoring can lead to costly errors. Why? Because even if the staff does have the expertise, they cannot continuously monitor asset health across all locations to prevent minor problems that can lead to significant crises.

The solution: An intelligent system control to keep their assets functioning at a high level. In this article, we’ll discuss how intelligent asset health monitoring works. First, let’s review the ultimate objective of intelligent system controls.

Objectives of Intelligent System Controls
No matter the industry or business, utilizing intelligence system controls can help you achieve three goals:

• By properly monitoring assets, you can maximize uptime and increase equipment efficiency without stopping the smooth flow of your operation. That’ll have a considerable impact on your revenue.
• By detecting faulty assets in the early stages, you can minimize planned and unplanned downtime and only perform maintenance when dictated by a schedule. By doing so, on-site managers can optimize workforce efficiency/productivity and make much better use of uptime.
• Workers don’t have to be constantly on-site and in contact with heavy, dangerous machinery in risky environments. A remote intelligent system control solution will ensure a smooth operation without any concerns for surprise failures and outages.

Challenges of Manual System Control
Some companies choose to appoint specialized managers to oversee the health of assets. Managers often complain about not having access to experienced people, spending significant amounts of time collecting data, and not spending enough on analyzing them. Meanwhile, they’re continuously working with inconsistent results and vague insights into asset health resulting from manual monitoring.

In addition, they have to deal with new, complex technologies and train the staff to use them effectively. Hence, it’s only logical they don’t have the resources to optimally monitor an asset’s condition and arrange maintenance when required. The situation only becomes more aggravated as the assets grow in number. As a consequence, they spend somewhere between 70-80 percent of their time collecting data and only 20-30 percent analyzing them and finding the underlying cause.

Now it’s time to turn to the benefits of utilizing an intelligent system control.

Benefits of an Intelligent System Control Solution
In any industry, cutting down operational costs goes a long way in helping a business thrive and advance its share in the market. Many consider predictive maintenance to be the perfect way to achieve that goal. By gathering accurate data on assets to predict slight failures, you can prevent catastrophic events leading to expensive repairs. Doing so requires an intelligent system able to consistently monitor key health parameters, such as power consumption to detect any asset health degradation.

Since systems work on a set of flexible parameters, they can immediately alarm the staff to examine any deviation from the normal baseline. Timely failure detection helps maximize maintenance efficiency, reduce costs, and increase revenue. In addition to financial merits, newer technology allows companies to use low-cost sensors, continuously monitor key system parameters and employ intelligent analytics.

In order to perform maintenance at a time of absolute necessity, performing maintenance depends on meeting certain conditions and before the asset breakdown. The automated solution provides managers with real-time, precise data on asset health, giving them the chance to take precautionary measures before the failure.

Managers will see when maintenance costs exceed replacement costs by having access to such accurate, timely data. That, in turn, will help them find the optimal time to replace the asset, rather than continuing repetitive maintenance, which won’t keep the asset operating in the optimal condition for long.

In general, intelligent system monitoring solutions come with certain advantages lacking in manual operations:

Operation Optimization
With an intelligent system control, companies don’t need to assign many specialized staff members to oversee assets. Moreover, they don’t have to spend a significant portion of their time visiting assets on-site, setting up tests, and creating records. Instead, they can spend their precious time on the most valuable tasks like assessing potential maintenance based on the real-time analysis provided for them.

Less Inconsistency
An automated, intelligent solution continuously monitors asset health parameters and provides real-time data analysis and collection. On-site specialists cannot possibly monitor assets across all departments and are only able to offer a few snapshots of every asset’s condition in a specific timeframe. As the volume of data increases, there’s a higher chance for error, omittance, and miscalculation.

Improved Predictions
While the ever-increasing volumes of data can be a significant hurdle for on-site managers, it’s a great benefit for automated solutions. Continuous monitoring and assessment provide the intelligent system with a broader database that includes historical performances and baseline data. The online solution can predict future faults with higher accuracy by using such data. It also eliminates the need to draw on gut feelings, past experiences, and guesswork.

Laser Focus
In today’s ultra-competitive market, there’s only one thing that can match the value of money: Time.

Nowadays, you have to constantly monitor the latest trends in the industry and come out with a unique product to stand out from the competition, making time evermore precious.

When a fIrm decides on a manual approach and places some of its manpower on asset health management, it effectively takes away time from its fundamental task and places it on something that’s unlikely to be of optimal quality. By using an automated, intelligent system, you can now focus all of your time, money, and expertise on improving your bottom line.

Bottom Line
Businesses always need to keep an eye on the performance of their assets across all departments. A slight glitch in the manufacturing process can lead to costly callbacks and undermine the whole reputation of a company. Most importantly, the cost of repairing or entirely replacing faulty assets can take a toll on resources and bring the operation to a halt.

That can all be prevented by using an intelligent system providing accurate insights into the health of assets in multiple locations. By providing real-time data collection and analysis, an automated solution can help managers determine the perfect maintenance window, maximize uptime and prevent planned and unplanned downtime.

With the vast spectrum of various providers, all with their unique benefits and drawbacks, it can be a bit overwhelming to find the right solution. Fortunately, you don’t need to look very far because IMTS’s intelligent system control solutions can meet your needs on every level while helping you pay as little as possible for safety.

Therefore, don’t hesitate another minute and contact us right now!