Travelling in an elevator, activating an air conditioning unit and operating all manner of manufacturing equipment will often mean employing the services of a vital, but often unseen and unheralded industrial mainstay – the electric motor.
Despite often being hidden away, they are a vital part of a whole myriad of industrial processes and therefore, keeping them running, efficiently maintained and operating cost effectively is essential. A key factor in achieving this for many industrial players is, of course, cost.
However, cost manifests itself in a number of different ways. Obviously, there is the upfront cost of actually purchasing the equipment and maintaining it over its lifecycle. There is also the additional cost of unplanned downtime; when the equipment is not running and the knock on impact that has on production and workflow.
While significant, these costs are often a tiny fraction of the entire lifecycle of the equipment. Unbeknown to many manufactures, the highest cost over 20 years of operation of an electric motor comes from its energy consumption.
Reliability of electric motors is intrinsically linked to all these factors and ABB Motion Services recently conducted a study with industrial maintenance and factory operators across 16 countries and a broad range of sectors including utilities, marine, food and beverage, oil and gas and metals, into the role of electric motors in industrial and manufacturing processes, and the strategies which can maximise their operating potential.
Damning downtime
The study showed that the typical cost of an outage that lasts for an eight hour working shift is $1m. That’s $125,000 per hour over an eight hour working shift, which equates easily to the time usually taken to get an operation back up and running when something goes wrong.
“The shocking statistic about this survey is that close to 70% of the companies we spoke to experienced this sort of outage and downtime at least once a month,” said Virve Viitanen, Head of Global Customer Care and Support, ABB Motion Services.
“Therefore, on average, they are facing the risk of $12m of direct impact for the downtime of the equipment per year. And on top of that comes all the indirect impact around reputation and customer satisfaction.
“While almost half of respondents identified reliability as a top priority when purchasing equipment, only 20% said the same of uptime. This underscores a critical point – operators are still not making the connection between the benefits of reliable equipment on uptime, their business reputation and their bottom line.”
She added that action can be taken by adopting more proactive maintenance strategies – with the survey revealing that companies that deploy such initiatives can expect to see around a 42% improvement in uptime.
An example of an ABB customer using such a preventative maintenance strategy is Ruchira Papers, an Indian paper producer which was experiencing continuous problems with equipment
Purchase, upkeep and energy
The next cost item is associated with equipment purchase, maintenance and modernisation. This is really about the optimal lifecycle of the equipment. Many view equipment as being a small cost item which in the broad scheme doesn’t matter; in fact, when it comes to large equipment, this can be a substantial cost in itself and a lot of decisions are based on this. Indeed, some decisions are even made solely on the upfront cost of the equipment,
However, when it comes to maintenance and modernisation, there are also actions that can be taken to improve on this cost. And again, being proactive will help reduce the direct cost of service activities, with predictive maintenance estimated to save 40% of maintenance and modernisation costs versus reactive strategies.
Virve continued: “When strategies are planned, you can ensure that the right capabilities and skilled people are in the right place at the right time and you have the necessary materials. That means the plan can be rolled-out in a more efficient and effective way than if you’re reacting to a situation which has come as a surprise or a shock.”
As for the third, and most significant cost piece, energy, here again, reliability is integral and walks hand-in-hand with sustainability. Reliability improves energy efficiency and energy consumption (that lion’s share of lifetime equipment cost). A study by the US Department for Energy found that around a 20% saving in annual energy spend can be achieved with reliability centred services.
Unfortunately, it’s not always the case within industry and manufacturing that the latest technology is being deployed to ensure that equipment is operating as planned.
Current maintenance strategies
ABB’s study showed that most industrial operators employ one of three maintenance strategies. The first is a run to fail strategy (reactive). This option, used by 21% of respondents, is restrictive and actions are only taken when equipment fails. “It’s risky, and more failures happen with this strategy. However, there are cases where it still might make sense,” added Virve.
The next strategy is a time-based maintenance strategy (preventive). Here, actions are taken based on a predetermined time schedule and on the statistical ageing of different components. The majority (45%) of the companies surveyed are using this strategy.
However, despite being the most prevalent maintenance strategy right now, this approach does have its drawbacks. Because it is based around time schedules, equipment can be scheduled for repair or reconditioning either too early (before it’s required) or too late (after the equipment has already failed).
There are other more emerging maintenance strategies available, and a condition-based (predictive) maintenance strategy means that equipment is first of all digitally connected and based on real-time data. The status or condition of equipment can then be analysed, and actions taken. Of the companies surveyed by ABB, 33% use a condition-based maintenance strategy.
“This can be beneficial in different environments,” Virve added. “For instance, if an industrial environment is particularly hot it can cause electrical components to age much faster. Therefore, this strategy can make a huge difference for optimising the actions that are taken. Sometimes it can even postpone actions that would have been taken with a preventive strategy, because it can show that equipment is actually in a better condition than was first thought, thus further enhancing sustainability.
“Regular maintenance is important to all industrial businesses, but certain strategies are more effective than others at achieving uptime. Nine in ten respondents said that maintenance has increased their uptime in the last year, but businesses using a condition-based strategy reported the best performance.”
An outcome based maintenance strategy
Despite these three most commonly used strategies, there is a fourth that is emerging which more and more manufacturers are keen to taken advantage of. This is called an outcome-based maintenance strategy. This results in the risk being taken away from the end user via a service provider that is contracted to provide a guaranteed outcome.
Virve added: “The obvious factor that comes to mind when you talk about outcome is uptime i.e., you only pay for the equipment when it is running.” However, she added that there are other types of outcomes that can be guaranteed via this strategy such as energy savings and efficiency, or availability of materials. So, instead of buying spare parts, the end user purchases access to them. If an incident occurs access is guaranteed without actually having to physically store the parts.
“The idea is that the service provider takes more risk away from the customer and instead of action just being taken it’s actually guaranteeing a certain outcome. One of the key findings from our survey was that 87% of companies are interested in moving in this direction.
Therefore, it’s clear that the momentum is there in the industry and the more industrial organisations move away from a run to fail-based strategy and towards an outcome-based model, the more the risk for the end customer reduces.
Virve stressed that it is certainly not a one-size-fits-all strategy however, and it is therefore important to have the data and transparency to understand what the right strategy is for any given situation. “The right strategy for some can be run to fail, in others it can be preventive” she added. “However, the more critical the equipment and the higher the cost related to an outage, the more these other two emerging strategies come into play.”
No is the time, but what does it take?
So, if the time is right to head towards outcome-based strategies, the natural question to ask is how do we get there? Virve mentioned how key connected assets and analytics are in this regard, but they are by no means enough.
“You actually need to know what the data is telling you,” she added. “And that’s where players like ABB Motion come in, because we have been there since the inception of equipment such as motors and drives.
“We are working with many customers across a variety of industries all over the world. And we know what data in a certain process or application requires, and crucially what actions need to be taken based on that data.”
However, even with data and the domain expertise of knowing what is going to happen, issues can still occur if the end user doesn’t have the right capabilities when it comes to execution. Therefore, a skilled workforce is vital as is the availability of the required materials.
Manufacturers learned, often at great cost, during the COVID crisis how critical these factors became when supply chains faced disruption, and recruiting and retaining the right people is not guaranteed.
Virve continued: “That’s where the benefit of an outcome-based business model is for customers because the service provider takes care of all this and by combining real-time data, domain expertise, knowledge and know-how, with the physical materials and people, reliability is guaranteed.”
What should customers do?
Transparency is not only key, but also king. Companies need to know the impact of downtime on their businesses, the criticality of different assets and knowing where actions should be taken. The next step should be to digitalise the equipment; connectivity results in more data in real-time for the critical assets.
Thirdly, invest in reliability. This can be done without digitalising the equipment. Knowing where the most critical areas in an organisation are and then investing in making sure that reliability in those areas is improved.
Lastly, consider a long-term, outcome-based service agreement to de-risk the business to create peace of mind. That then allows the company to focus on its own core competence instead of worrying about the reliability of equipment.
Virve concluded: “Equipment is hidden inside almost all critical operations in society. So, its reliability is important to all of us. Costly outages occur roughly once a month for 70% of businesses, so there is clearly a case for doing something.
“Action is being taken but many are still relying on a fully reactive strategy. So, taking more proactive strategies and auditing the impact of reliability makes sense. Sixty percent of surveyed customers said they are going to invest more in reliability. The good news for them is that when they invest in reliability, they will also see improvements in sustainability. So, they can expect energy efficiency to improve and to also receive savings.
“Investing in reliability is the pathway to maximising uptime, saving costs, increasing competitiveness and protecting piece of mind. Outcome-based service models will be a key component of maintenance in the future. In an increasingly uncertain world, it makes sense to control things that are within your control.”