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Understand the science of lubrication to optimize reliability at your plant

Doc Palmer on wrench time dos and don’ts / P.19 More time to make the right decision / P.21

AUGUST 2017

CMMS sets structure for success / P.26 NFPA 70E 2018: What’s coming / P.50

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TABLE OF CONTENTS AUGUST 2017 / VOL. 37, NO. 8

SPECIALISTS 07 / FROM THE EDITOR

FEATURES 28 / COVER STORY

Be a Smooth Operator Understand the science of lubrication to optimize your plant’s lubrication practices and lift reliability 34 / ENGINEERING

New and (Actually) Improved: Compressed Air Innovations in Focus New data collection and storage functions promise to deliver smarter control and better efficiency 38 / INTERVIEW: CMRP OF THE YEAR – RISING LEADER

Robert Bishop, CMRP, CRL, Chemtrade Syracuse What is one secret to helping your team run more efficiently and effectively? Recognize what you can learn from others 42 / PLANT MANAGEMENT

Rainbow Connection Understanding different personality and communication styles can affect progress at your plant more than you might think

Ways of Seeing Data Keep One Eye Open while using the IIoT to drive new value 09 / HUMAN CAPITAL

‘I Get It...My Boss Doesn’t’ Is your boss risk-averse? Here’s how to boost chances of getting projects approved 11 / TECHNOLOGY TOOLBOX

Asset Monitoring On The Go, Part 2 Mobile, multifunctional tools aim to be game-changers for asset health analysis 15 / ASSET MANAGER

Steer Clear of CMMS Project Pitfalls Know the key targets you’ll be judged on and build up a slew of short-term wins 19 / PALMER’S PLANNING CORNER

Wrench Time Dos and Don’ts There are right ways and wrong ways (and reasons) to analyze wrench time

50 / BIG PICTURE INTERVIEW

Tim Rohrer, president, CEO, and founder of Exiscan “Hazard elimination has always been the prime directive. I tell people, NFPA 70E is really a very simple document; if you want to boil it down to one sentence, it’s this: Turn it off before you go in.”

PLANT SERVICES (ISSN 0199-8013) is published monthly by Putman Media, Inc., 1501 E. Woodfield Road, Suite 400N, Schaumburg, IL 60173. Phone (630) 467-1300, Fax (630) 467-0197. Periodicals Postage Paid at Schaumburg, IL and additional mailing Offices. Canada Post International Publications Mail Product Sales Agreement No. 40028661. Canadian Mail Distributor Information: Frontier/BWI,PO Box 1051, Fort Erie, Ontario, Canada, L2A 5N8.

Printed in U.S.A. POSTMASTER: Postmaster: Please send change of address to Putman Media, PO Box 1888, Cedar Rapids IA 52406-1888; 1-800-553-8878 ext 5020. SUBSCRIPTIONS: Qualified reader subscriptions are accepted from PLANT SERVICES managers, supervisors and engineers in manufacturing plants in the U.S. and Canada. To apply for qualified-reader subscriptions, please go to www.plantservices.com. To non-qualified subscribers in the U.S., subscriptions are $96 per year. Single copies are $15. Subscription to Canada and other international are accepted at $200 (Airmail only) © 2017 by Putman Media, Inc. All rights reserved. The contents of this publication may not be reproduced in whole or in part without consent of the copyright owner. In an effort to more closely align with our business partners in a manner that provides the most value to our readers, content published in PLANT SERVICES magazine appears on the public domain of PLANT SERVICES’ Website, and August also appear on Websites that apply to our growing marketplace. Putman Media, Inc. also publishes CHEMICAL PROCESSING, CONTROL, CONTROL DESIGN, FOOD PROCESSING, THE JOURNAL, PHARMACEUTICAL MANUFACTURING and SMART INDUSTRY. PLANT SERVICES assumes no responsibility for validity of claims in items published.

DEPARTMENTS 21 / AUTOMATION ZONE

26 / WHAT WORKS

More Time to Make the Right Decision

CMMS Sets Structure for Success

There’s a very strong link between better alarm management and improved reliability

A new CMMS (and patience) proves a lifeline for a casting company drowning in data

24 /YOUR SPACE

46 / PRODUCT ROUNDUP

How IIoT Devices Talk To Each Other

Instrumentation

The IIC’s Industrial Internet Connectivity Framework facilitates communication, data-sharing for connected assets

If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it 48 / CLASSIFIEDS / AD INDEX

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FROM THE EDITOR

IN MEMORY OF JULIE CAPPELLETTI-LANGE, Vice President 1984-2012 PUTMAN MEDIA, INC. 1501 E. Woodfield Road, Suite 400N, Schaumburg, IL 60173 (630) 467-1300 Fax: (630) 467-1120 MIKE BRENNER Group Publisher mbrenner@putman.net

EDITORIAL STAFF THOMAS WILK Editor in Chief twilk@putman.net

CHRISTINE LaFAVE GRACE Managing Editor clafavegrace@putman.net

ALEXIS GAJEWSKI Associate Editor, Digital Media agajewski@putman.net

STEPHEN C. HERNER V.P., Creative & Production sherner@putman.net

DEREK CHAMBERLAIN Senior Art Director dchamberlain@putman.net

DAVID BERGER, P.ENG. Contributing Editor

PETER GARFORTH Contributing Editor

SHEILA KENNEDY, CMRP Contributing Editor

TOM MORIARTY, P.E., CMRP Contributing Editor

DOC PALMER, P.E., MBA, CMRP Contributing Editor

PUBLICATION SERVICES CARMELA KAPPEL Assistant to the Publisher ckappel@putman.net

JERRY CLARK V.P., Circulation jclark@putman.net

JACK JONES Circulation Director jjones@putman.net

RITA FITZGERALD Production Manager rfitzgerald@putman.net

JILL KALETHA Reprint Marketing Manager Foster Reprints (866) 879-9144 ext.194 jillk@fosterprinting.com

EXECUTIVE STAFF JOHN M. CAPPELLETTI President/CEO

THOMAS WILK, EDITOR IN CHIEF

A FEW SMALL REPAIRS Learning a bigger lesson via Mount Rushmore’s annual PMs We’re now smack in the middle of summer, and there’s a good chance you’re reading this issue while either on vacation or catching up at work after getting away from it all.

About this time last year, my family and I were headed west on our boys’ first road trip, heading out from Chicago to see a landmark that had captured the imagination of our oldest son. At the age of 5, his goal in life had become a quest to see Mount Rushmore – or, as he called it, Round Mushmore.

He first came across it on the South Dakota quarter, and soon it was all he could talk about. To get ready for the trip, he and I would plot out the driving route (on paper maps!) and use the internet to learn as much as we could about the history of both the Black Hills and the monument itself.

From a distance and in certain light the monument looks seamless. However, when you look at picture after picture of Mount Rushmore, something becomes apparent pretty fast: The monument is full of cracks. We’re not talking a chipped nose or bruised chin; these are cracks that run up and down the rock, at least 140 of them, across each face as well as Washington’s lapels.

It turns out that the worst enemy of the monument is freeze/thaw cycle of the Black Hills, in which water seeps into cracks and crevices during warmer months and then freezes in the winter, exerting several tons of pressure on the granite. Annual maintenance takes place in October, with an effort to review known cracks and measure and seal new ones with silicone caulk; a few of the larger cracks are covered with Kevlar material and then sealed with the caulk.

You can set your watch by this annual maintenance event, and there are a lot of

articles and videos out there that show how the field crews handle repairs while staring some U.S. presidents in their enormous eyes.

This year is more of a staycation for us, with our oldest, now 6, learning how to get some much-needed fixer-uppers done around the house. Today was a painting day, and he noticed how our efforts to spread the coats evenly to leave a smooth finish were similar to the repair work

IT’S A GOOD FEELING TO PASS ASSET CARE ON TO THE NEXT GENERATION. that he saw on Mount Rushmore. It’s a good feeling to pass asset care on to the next generation. It’s also not every day when you feel like your home repairs are of literally monumental importance.

Or, as Leonard Cohen put it: “There is a crack, a crack in everything / That’s how the light gets in.”

A final note: If you’re interested in filling in some of the gaps in your digital skill set, consider joining your peers this September 18-20 at Smart Industry (www.event.smartindustry.com). The agenda is filled with speakers who are leading digital transformation at their organizations, with a strong focus on the ways in which the industrial internet is improving the ability of plant teams to reduce unplanned downtime and optimize asset health and care. I look forward to seeing you there!

Thomas Wilk, Editor in Chief twilk@putman.net, (630) 467-1300 x412

KEITH LARSON VP, Content and Group Publisher

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HUMAN CAPITAL TOM MORIARTY, P.E., CMRP

‘I GET IT...MY BOSS DOESN’T’ Is your boss risk-averse? Here’s how to boost chances of getting projects approved I’ve been delivering to supervisors and managers a set of workshops on the Accountability Model©, which is a methodology for developing good processes and measures, and then applying Productive Leadership© for disciplined execution of processes. At some point, usually during a break or at the end, someone will state, “I get it, but how do you get the project approved in the first place?” It’s a common problem. So, let’s explore it.

Whether you believe it or not, your boss is a human being.

Human beings have amazingly complex structures in their brains. The nearly infinite number of neuron connections means we all look at things uniquely. One result is that people have different risk tolerances. It’s one reason why some people are accountants and others are NASCAR drivers.

It’s easy to say that so long as a business case is made, senior leaders will fall all over themselves to approve your initiative. But this assumes that the person pitching the business case has credibility, the business case is sound, and the decision-maker has enough fortitude to pull the trigger, so to speak. You can control only your own credibility and the quality of the business case. You can influence the decision-maker, but you can’t control him or her.

Credibility is about trust, which we can define as confidence in the thoughts and actions of others. Confidence in your thoughts and actions is based on the history of your performance in day-to-day activities and projects you’ve completed. The scope and scale of each initiative informs decision-makers on your judgment and the level of responsibility with which you can be entrusted.

On every initiative you undertake, do a business-case analysis. Find out what your organization views as the minimally acceptable rate of return (MARR) and payback period. These are usually something like 20% MARR and less than one or two years for payback. There may be a difference between the stated MARR and payback period and your decision-makers’ risk tolerance. Over time, you’ll get a feel for what individual decision-makers need to hear, and you’ll build up a library of estimating tools and techniques.

Completing a lot of smaller successful initiatives will accrue benefits. Building a track record of successes also means you can communicate frequently with your boss.

Your interactions should be used to develop a rapport with your boss; you will get insights on your boss, and your boss will get more information on your dependability.

Keep track of the accumulated benefits from your projects. When you feel you have accumulated enough benefits, start introducing larger initiatives.

Introduce larger initiatives at a place and time when the boss is not under pressure (avoid crowds, and don’t do it shortly after a stressful event). Give a short, well-reasoned, and sufficiently detailed overview, and ask for the boss to take some time to consider it. Follow up a few days later with

PEOPLE HAVE DIFFERENT RISK TOLERANCES. IT’S ONE REASON WHY SOME PEOPLE ARE ACCOUNTANTS AND OTHERS ARE NASCAR DRIVERS. a scheduled meeting. You may not get approval for the whole enchilada, but maybe you’ll get approval for sub-projects that will help you get where you want to be.

Remember, risk tolerance and fortitude are individual characteristics. Most people in senior positions have direct experience with failed initiatives. Every failed initiative reinforces risk. Any initiative that fails reflects poorly on the decision-maker. It’s comfortable for decision-makers to stick with common practices in your organization’s industry. If the boss stays within industry norms, there is lower risk.

Bosses with fortitude, however, will be open to solutions used by competitors and in other communities of practice.

Remember that your boss is playing the same credibility and fortitude game with his or her bosses. Your boss needs you to be credible, be able to present an excellent business case, and help manage the fortitude of higher-ups.

If your boss trusts you implicitly and you present strong business cases, and the organization still resists moving ahead, it’s a fortitude thing. You can wait out your current bosses and hope you get a new one who will be less riskaverse. You can wait for a major event that jerks everyone from their risk-averse safe space. You can continue to do what you’ve been doing and be satisfied with it. Or, you can update your resume and look for an organization that boasts leaders who have fortitude.

Tom Moriarty, P.E., CMRP, is president of Alidade MER. Contact him at tjmpe@alidade-mer.com and (321) 773-3356.

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TECHNOLOGY TOOLBOX SHEILA KENNEDY, CMRP

ASSET MONITORING ON THE GO, PART 2 Mobile, multifunctional tools aim to be game-changers for asset health analysis Asset condition monitoring devices are achieving new levels of usability, making data collection, analysis, and corrective actions more efficient and timely. Smartphoneenabled solutions, multipurpose devices, and an innovative handheld oil analysis tool allow anomalies to be spotted earlier and addressed more effectively with collaborative, intelligent maintenance decisions.

SMARTPHONE-SUPPORTED IR TOOLS

Low-resolution, smartphone-based thermal imagers can be a powerful new tool for helping monitor assets. Putting these NDT tools in the hands of operations personnel allows anomalies to be identified and reported earlier and lets managers plan and schedule minor repairs before further damage occurs, says Rob Miller, reliability director at Stockton Infrared Thermographic Services.

Attaching a miniature IR camera to an operator’s smartphone or tablet allows visual temperature information to be collected and distributed to maintenance personnel immediately via text or email, Miller explains. “The relatively low cost of implementing this technology makes it easy to integrate into existing daily routines,” he says.

To facilitate the collection and trend analysis of IR inspection data, new E Sentry Connect asset tags from IRISS use near-field communication (NFC) Smart Card technology that allows contactless communication with Android smartphones and tablets.

E Sentry Connect tags with embedded maintenance instructions are deployed on the assets. New readings PRUFTECHNIK

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and detailed notes entered in an app on the smartphone or tablet are then recorded onto the tag by “bumping” the tag, explains Rudy Wodrich, VP of engineering services at IRISS. The recorded data is uploaded to the cloud the next time the device connects to the internet, and from there it can be transferred to an asset management (EAM/CMMS) system.

SMARTPHONE-ENABLED SOLUTIONS, MULTIPURPOSE DEVICES, AND AN INNOVATIVE HANDHELD OIL ANALYSIS TOOL ALLOW ANOMALIES TO BE SPOTTED EARLIER.

MULTIFUNCTION VIBRATION DEVICES

User-friendly portable vibration meters record, analyze, and display vibration signals with a click of a button. The one-click TPI 9071 smart vibration meter from Test Products International displays color-coded alarm levels for ISO values and bearing damage units (BDU) readings. It detects imbalance, misalignment, and overall looseness as well as more-complex issues.

“You can buy a vibration data collector with spectrum capabilities for less than a smartphone and much easier to use than the smartphone,” says Jim Weidner, vibration specialist at TPI. “When you do more-frequent checks, you catch impending problems such as water in the oil, overheating, loose and worn belts, and low lubrication.”

A multifunction portable tool for performing routebased vibration analysis of rotating machinery is the OneProd Falcon Smart Data Collector from VibrAlign.

Designed for efficiency, it has built-in features including a digital camera, a strobe light, a spot pyrometer, a bar-code scanner, voice annotation, two-channel balancing, a wireless triaxial sensor, and patent-pending Accurex automatic diagnosis software.

“Accurex uses proprietary technologies to diagnose machine problems such as imbalance, misalignment, friction, gear defects, and cavitation within seconds, next to the machine,” says Brian Shanovich, ACOEM product line manager at VibrAlign. It also displays confidence and severity levels and offers suggested actions.

WWW.PLANTSERVICES.COM AUGUST 2017 11

TECHNOLOGY TOOLBOX

The Vibxpert II from Pruftechnik is a handheld tool for efficient route-based data collection, vibration analysis, and field balancing. It can also be used to perform acceptance

measurements of newly produced or installed rotating equipment. “Oneor two-plane balancing and advanced diagnostic tools such as FFT coastdown, bump tests, or modal analysis

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Pruftechnik’s associated Omnitrend software allows users to manage their assets based on machine-specific vibration data. Optional automatic measurement location identification with Pruftechnik’s Vibcode transducer is designed to maximize data quality during route measurements.

PORTABLE INFRARED OIL ANALYSIS

Reliability engineers can conduct oil analysis on their maintenance route via the FluidScan handheld infrared oil analyzer from Spectro Scientific.

FluidScan provides quantitative measurement of dissolved and free water using infrared spectroscopy, explains Randi Price, senior applications chemist at Spectro Scientific. “This allows rapid, on-site determination of water contamination for critical pieces of machinery, such as turbines, without having to wait for results to come back from a lab,” Price says.

FluidScan uses a built-in library of more than 700 oils and reliable calibrations to accurately report key parameters including oxidation, water, TAN, and TBN. It helps provide an overall picture of oil chemistry and contamination.

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ASSET MANAGER DAVID BERGER, P.ENG.

STEER CLEAR OF CMMS PROJECT PITFALLS Know the key targets you’ll be judged on and build up a slew of short-term wins The goal of every manager responsible for any project is

to deliver high-quality product on time and on budget. This is true whether building a new plant, repairing a roof, or implementing a CMMS. If you have been on the front line, you know just how easy this is to say but how difficult it is to accomplish. Discussed below are important considerations when managing projects such as the implementation of a new or upgraded CMMS. Do not start a project without knowing on what basis you will be judged a hero or a persona non grata. This means putting some context around the project, such as strategic goals and objectives, critical success factors, and performance targets. A simple example illustrates the importance of this exercise.

Suppose you order a red sports car to be delivered in six weeks at a cost of $40,000. In four weeks, the salesperson phones and explains that the car you ordered is delayed a month, but a yellow one just arrived with identical features except for leather seats, at an additional cost of $2,000. Do you want the yellow one?

If timing is your dominant objective, then perhaps you are willing to exceed your budget by $2,000 and not get the “quality” you wanted in order to take delivery of the product two weeks early. If your performance is measured on how quickly you deliver, you would be a hero to accept the yellow car. In contrast, if the dominant objective is cost or product quality, you would be out of a job to take delivery of the yellow one. By extension, it is vital to determine relevant performance targets for your project so that you will know which trade-offs along the way are acceptable.

Another challenge in project management is ensuring consensus on the definition of a “quality” product delivered.

Quality is in the eyes of the beholder. For example, what assumptions have been made as to how rigorous the testing of your new or upgraded CMMS will be? Are detailed test scripts required by a team of 10 users from across all stakeholders to thoroughly test the product over a six-week period in a production-like environment? Or is it sufficient to send a couple of users to a few days of vendor demonstrations?

There are many possible deliverables for a given project.

Assumptions must be stated up front and the scope clearly defined in light of key performance targets. One of the most common enemies of every well-intentioned project manager is scope creep. Listed below are key deliverables to consider

when implementing a new CMMS and, to a lesser degree, a CMMS upgrade.

Pre-engineering research: This includes market research, competitive analysis, benchmarking, an employee survey, process analysis, a review of historical data, and/or interviews with key stakeholders. The research can be used to develop or validate performance targets and to determine the most appropriate actions for achieving them.

IT IS VITAL TO DETERMINE RELEVANT PERFORMANCE TARGETS FOR YOUR PROJECT SO THAT YOU WILL KNOW WHICH TRADEOFFS ALONG THE WAY ARE ACCEPTABLE. Operating principles: The strategic goals and objectives will naturally drive out operating principles by which the project is guided. For example, response time on critical equipment must be fast, accurate, and consistent 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Scope definition: A prioritized list of activities must be agreed upon by all stakeholders. The best approach is to limit the scope of each phase of the project so that stakeholders see progress in achieving performance targets as soon as possible. For example, start with a pilot implementation of the preventive maintenance module in one of your smaller facilities to get some immediate savings and gain traction for the project.

Re-engineered process flows: To achieve stated performance targets, typically the new or upgraded CMMS will act as an enabler for process and other changes. For example, the project may be responsible for removing lowvalue activities or facilitating faster response time through condition-based maintenance and notifications.

Procedures and documentation: Process flows are eventually transformed into detailed procedures. The procedures may be quite detailed, with the inclusion of CMMS screenshots, a description of roles and responsibilities for anyone involved in the process, an impact and risk analysis of any processes that will be changing, and a discussion of exceptions and contingency processes.

Systems specification: For any new CMMS or changes to an old CMMS, a detailed specification document is needed WWW.PLANTSERVICES.COM AUGUST 2017 15

ASSET MANAGER

that reflects business requirements.

Business case: A cost-benefit analysis must be completed for any project to show how performance targets will be met.

Issues and opportunities logs: Smooth project management requires a slick issues-resolution process. This necessitates keeping careful track of issues, including documenting the person who identified the issue (the originator), specifying the person responsible for seeking resolution, and noting the resolution date required, the identified solution, the date resolved, and the name of the person who authorized the solution. Opportunities are recorded on a separate log. The key difference between the issues and opportunities logs is that issues require immediate resolution to meet performance targets, whereas opportunities can wait for a subsequent phase (e.g., integration of the CMMS with RFID technology).

Service-level agreements: Maintenance and operations should establish formal service-level targets (for example, response times) that will incent a change in behavior long after the project is over.

Test plan: A number of deliverables are included under the test plan; among these are test scripts, user acceptance

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testing, integration testing, stress testing, usability testing, and pilot. Testing should not be limited to the CMMS; it should include processes as well.

Job design: The change in systems and processes may lead to new job definitions. The project team uses work measurement, analysis of skills required, and/or resource balancing to determine the new job design.

Facilities design: Upon examining material flow, layout, ergonomic design, and workflow, the project team may require changes to the premises.

Training plan: Training also covers a lot of ground, including technical training on the system, training on the new processes, and training supervisors on how to manage change for front-line workers. Methods of training can vary widely, from online help on the CMMS to establishing a help desk for employees during implementation.

Communications plan: The employees must be prepared for the speed and degree of change required. Regular communication is vital. This can take the form of town hall meetings, newsletters, department meeting updates, and so on to achieve “employee readiness.”

Post-implementation review: Last but by no means least, the post-implementation review is a critical deliverable to validate that performance targets have been successfully met. Any required corrective action is also identified.

The secret to a successful project is making sure that realistic expectations are set and met. Stakeholders must feel ownership of the project through some level of involvement, whether they’re part of a steering committee for middle managers, an executive committee for senior managers, or workshops for technicians or other stakeholders. There should be regular reviews of the detailed timeline and issues log to make sure the project is on track.

Be careful to bring to the project not only good technicians but also people who have credibility with and influence over key stakeholder groups. This is especially important as implementation draws near for stakeholders – i.e., when the snipers emerge and guerilla warfare begins. Managers then begin to pay closer attention to communications and finally read through the specification documentation.

That is why, where possible, you should avoid “big bang” projects that have a long lead time on key deliverables. These are the worst projects for managing expectations. To be successful, deliver on multiple milestones over short-term intervals; make sure stakeholders have skin in the game; and maintain constant communication.

Email Contributing Editor David Berger, P.Eng., MBA, president of The Lamus Group Inc., at davidb@lamusgroup.com.

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PALMER’S PLANNING CORNER DOC PALMER, PE, MBA, CMRP

WRENCH TIME DOS AND DON’TS There are right ways and wrong ways (and reasons) to analyze wrench time Wrench time causes controversy for a number of reasons. The concept of wrench time explains why there is a significant opportunity for maintenance to increase its productivity. However, a plant does not need to measure it. In fact, I would argue that a plant should probably not measure it. Wrench time can be a terrible measure for a number of reasons. Nevertheless, if a plant does measure wrench time, there are proper and improper ways to do it.

In January we discussed the great value of maintenance planning in terms of wrench time (“Plan-it Fitness,” http:// plnt.sv/PPC-FITNESS). Wrench time is essentially the percentage of time crafts spend actually working without delays out of the total time available. Improving wrench time from a typical 35% to a best-practice 55% yields a 57% improvement in productivity, with all of the extra work being proactive. A plant completing 1,000 work orders per month could be completing 1,570 work orders per month with the same workforce, or 570 extra proactive work orders per month for free. Planning and scheduling answers the question: How can we complete more proactive work to head off failures when we have our hands full of reactive work?

Nevertheless, a plant does not need to measure its wrench time if it can accept that without proper planning and scheduling, maintenance productivity is probably at 35% and that proper planning and scheduling will improve it to 55%. Furthermore, simply measuring wrench time will not improve it. Proper planning and scheduling will improve it. A plant starting to plan and schedule properly should see its work-order completion rate rise – generally a step change of about 57% – with most of the new work that’s completed being proactive. So why measure wrench time when what you actually wanted was a higher rate of work-order completions anyway? The concept of wrench time simply explains why proper planning and scheduling helps increase work-order completions.

There are additional reasons not to measure wrench time.

For one, the act of measuring can make people nervous and start unwarranted rumors about staffing levels. For another, wrench time can be a terribly misleading measure.

A carpenter could show up at the wrong house and hammer slowly all day without taking a break or needing more nails.

The carpenter might thus have 100% wrench time doing the wrong job. Yet we presume that for the time available to work, management generally directs crafts to the right work, and craftspersons generally work efficiently. Wrench time

WRENCH TIME HAS ITS MERITS AS A METRIC, BUT IT IS NOT THE PERFECT KPI.

has its merits as a metric, but it is not the perfect KPI. Still, in spite of the risk of upsetting its workforce and the effort involved, a plant may decide it wants to measure its maintenance wrench time. A plant might want to convince itself that it is a typical plant, recording 35% wrench time, or gauge whether it has an effective planning and scheduling program. Note that wrench time really measures the effectiveness of planning and scheduling rather than the willingness of craftspersons to complete tasks efficiently.

Not all methods to measure wrench time are valid. One type of study, using work and delay times self-reported by the craftspersons, is not valid. Most such results will be in the 70% or higher range. It is difficult for craftspersons to recognize that a delay moment here or there is not actually “work.” In addition, if it is difficult for management to recognize that typical wrench time is only 35%, how can one expect craftspersons to understand that 35% is “OK” and report themselves accurately?

A second type of study, called DILO (“day in the life of”), in which observers follow specific persons around all day,

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PLANNING CORNER

also is generally not valid – most of the time, this type of study will produce wrench times of 50% or higher. Why are DILO studies not accurate indicators? For one thing, the persons selected for following might not be “typical” craftspersons on “typical” days. For another, persons being followed generally do not act as they normally would.

A third type of study, in which observers go at statistically set times into a shop area to see what visible persons are doing is – you guessed it – also not valid. This analysis, too, tends to produce wrench time results upward of 50%. These studies don’t take into account persons who are available but who aren’t in the shop area. These unseen persons might have been traveling, in the storeroom, or in some other delay area.

The best method for measuring wrench time is with a statistical method where each person in the workforce has an equal chance of being observed over a sufficient period to represent the actual workforce over time. Most plants can, over the course of about a month, conduct a reasonable study that might be representative of the ongoing plant using a single day each week for observations. For example, the observer could use Monday the first week, Tuesday the second week,

etc., through Friday the fifth week. Going down through names on a set roster and making two observations each half-hour over the course of eight-hour days would provide 160 observations and margin of error of plus or minus 7%.

Thus, a plant at 35% wrench time would know if it is between 28% and 42% and probably not at 55% (or 80%). A plant that improved to 50% wrench time would know if it is between 43% and 57% and probably not a typical plant at 35%.

The concept of wrench time is invaluable to unlocking great productivity through proper planning and scheduling, but you do not have to measure it. Be cautious if you do. Feel free to email me if you would like a copy of an actual wrench-time study with its methodology and results, a slide presentation on doing an in-house study yourself, and my current list of work and delay categories and definitions that I find helpful.

Doc Palmer is the author of McGraw-Hill’s Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Handbook and, as managing partner of Richard Palmer and Associates, helps companies worldwide with planning and scheduling success. Visit www.palmerplanning.com or email docpalmer@palmerplanning.com.

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TYRON VARDY, HONEYWELL PROCESS SOLUTIONS

MORE TIME TO MAKE THE RIGHT DECISION There’s a very strong link between better alarm management and improved reliability Tyron Vardy is a global product director for alarm and operations management software at Honeywell Process Solutions (www.honeywellprocess.com). Tyron spoke with Plant Services in June at the Honeywell User Group event on how the operator’s role is evolving with alarm management technologies.

PS When it comes to improved alarm management, what’s the first place to start?

TV Historically, what alarm management tools have done

is they’ve provided lots of clever ways of reporting on how the alarm system is performing. You’ve got a thousand alarms a day, and they give you a stack of very nice-looking reports, and everyone is trying to work out different ways to report on the same data. For me, the next focus or the next wave of evolution of alarm management is to start turning all those reports into something that people can actually take action on that will drive safer operations.

When you talk to most people about alarm management and process safety, they’ll always cite standards like ISA 18.2 as the guideline, or EEMEA 191, which says that they want to try and get down to something like one or two alarms every 10 minutes, which is deemed to be safe, sort of steadystate operations, which is absolutely fine.

I think we need to take a step back and say, “Why is that acceptable? Why is one or two things going wrong every 10 minutes acceptable?” Truly the fix to alarm management is to address the cause and not the effects, so to fix alarm management you need to take away the alarms. That to me is what the vision of alarm management should be, to operate the plant without any alarms or abnormal situations.

If we had this conversation one or two years ago, it would be a vision that we wouldn’t know how to deliver.

But now, with advancements in cloud technology, IIoT, and digital transformation, there is a path to that vision because now you’re not just looking at the alarms – you can plug in data from any other source; you can see what the operator was doing in the field at the time. You can see what the asset management system was doing. You can see what safety overrides and bypasses were inhibited. You know, all those layers of protection that tend to get eroded away when different things happen.

I think the way that anyone should start is that, if they’re looking at alarm management on day one, they’ve got 60% of alarms that don’t mean a thing. The chances are that the operator can just close his or her eyes, and blindly acknowledge them. They don’t necessarily mean anything because these alarms have been around for the last 25, 30, 40 years, everyone knows what they are, it’s just noise and people ignore it.

So, for example, the first thing to do is to get 1,000 alarms

I THINK YOU’RE SEEING A LOT OF THE LARGER COMPANIES LOOKING AT ALARM MANAGEMENT AND OPERATIONAL MANAGEMENT AS BEING INTERTWINED. down to 300, and that’s what the tools are great for today.

Plants can get a lot of improvement in a very short period of time. Three months is not uncommon to reduce alarms by 50%. The problem then lies in what you do with the rest of the alarms, because the rest truly do need action.

You’ve got to change the mindset of the operator as well.

If the operator is used to 1,000 alarms and he can blindly acknowledge 60% of them, when you’ve (now) got 300 alarms and one of those comes in, he can’t blindly acknowledge (that) anymore because that alarm genuinely means something that it didn’t mean before you implemented this whole management program.

I think alarm management is now beyond just what happens at the console. If I can get a plant and an asset and an operation to operate their equipment or their process where they’re not exceeding the limits of the equipment or the limits of the plant, then they’re not putting assets under strain and exposing the plant to risk. And when you’re talking oil and gas, for example, or chemical plants, uptime is everything. So I think you’re seeing a lot of the larger companies looking at alarm management and operational management as being intertwined. If they can manage the process better, they don’t have the alarms.

PS Some plants are training some of their operators on basic maintenance tasks so that they’ll have more of an investment in their machine. Yet how can operators succeed when they’re bombarded with thousands of alarms?

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AUTOMATION ZONE

TV I think that’s a good point. What is the job of operations? It’s to run the plant. You know, the business wants to make money, but it has to be made as safe as possible, so no one is going to compromise process safety or people safety for the sake of more production. So you’ve got to try and get the most out of the business while maintaining operational integrity.

When we get to this vision of managing the plant, managing the alarms correctly, operators can almost move to process managers or even business managers; they can do more than what their current scope is. I think people get complacent and think, “Well, operators are there to react to the alarms.” I don’t think they are. They’re there to mitigate risk, and when things go wrong it’s their job to get things back on track.

I tend to find that if you talk to maintenance teams about alarm management, there’s a nodding approval that, yes, it’s important but no one is taking ownership of it. The production reliability guy, it’s his job at the end of the day to make sure that the business is performing and

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teams are meeting throughput goals, so they are the guys who will tend to drive alarm management. The maintenance team seems to be on the reactive side – the work order comes in, and they go and fix it – whereas the job of the reliability guy and the production guy is to run that plant as safely as possible and produce what operations needs, so they certainly understand it.

PS How much of a challenge is it to get an executive team to buy into something like this?

TV If you go back 15 years, selling alarm management felt like selling an insurance policy: “If you buy it, something might not happen.” And the answer that will come back is, well, it might not happen anyway, so why am I buying it?

That’s completely different now. When I see companies that do alarm management well, it’s always because at the very top, somebody is saying, “This is one of the priorities that we need to do.” They might phrase it in a different way.

They might say, “Look, you know, we need to drive this business harder and get the maximum out of the business, but we need to make sure that we maintain the highest level of safety,” and you can’t do that with a thousand alarms per operator per hour.

There’s also a huge range between the companies that are looking at predictive analytics and cloud computing to try and solve reliability or safety issues, and those that are five years behind the curve. For those that are just starting out, they can get to where others are much more quickly than before because it’s a well-trodden path.

It’s exciting times at the moment because I think this is the first time in almost 20 years that we’re at that point where we’re going to see a complete phase change, a complete shift change in what alarm management can deliver. I think now, we’re in a state where we can start to look at true early event detection, where we can say, “We know something is going wrong, why are we waiting for the alarm?”

Truly, we need to give operators more time to make the right decision, so if we can give them 5, 10, 15 more minutes of thinking time than they have today, you create a much safer, less reactive environment. What problem are we trying to solve? Reduce the process risk, increase the operational integrity, and reduce the operator error.

For me, the vision is let’s set the bar high. We’ll probably never get zero alarms because things are always going to go wrong; it’s a combustible industry and things are always going to break. But, why is one alarm every 10 minutes acceptable, where it should be one alarm every 10 hours or every 12 hours or every shift or something? I think we have to look at it differently.

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YOUR SPACE

BY DR. RAJIVE JOSHI, IIC

HOW IIoT DEVICES TALK TO EACH OTHER The IICâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Industrial Internet Connectivity Framework facilitates communication, data-sharing for connected assets The Industrial Internet Consortium (IIC) recently released the Industrial Internet Connectivity Framework, the first technical publication providing a comprehensive guide for industrial internet of things (IIoT) communications. The framework results from a multiyear collaboration of IIC members.

The IICF defines the role of connectivity as the ability to exchange data among participants within a functional domain, across functional domains, within a system, and across systems. The data exchanged may include sensor updates, events, alarms, status changes, commands, and configuration updates.

The IICF also introduces a new IIoT connectivity stack model that is an evolution of the four-layer internet stack model (c.1989) and the seven-layer OSI stack model (c.1994) with IIoT considerations added in. The new IIoT connectivity stack model, shown in the figure below, is notable for clarifying the layers above the networking layer; specifically, it introduces a new framework layer and clarifies the transport layer.

Most notably, the IICF defines the minimum expectation: An IIoT connectivity stack provides syntactic interoperability 2017 IIoT CONNECTIVITY STACK MODEL

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between IIoT components and subsystems. Syntactic interoperability is the unambiguous exchange of structured data between participants. The IICF clarifies that syntactic interoperability is the essential building block for interoperable systems and thus is critical for unleashing the IIoTâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s potential.

The framework layer in the IIoT connectivity stack is responsible for providing syntactic interoperability. The minimum expectation of this stack is that the connectivity infrastructure is able to handle sharing of structured data types among participants, regardless of the computing platform or the programming language that applications use.

So, what does syntactic interoperability mean in practice?

Consider a scenario in which a participant wants to share a data type containing a string and two numbers. The other participants may be on different platforms that may have been built at different times by different people in different places using different programming languages.

Syntactic interoperability ensures that the data type is interpreted unambiguously by all parties. That requires the connectivity infrastructure to maintain sufficient context, including, for example, the string representation (e.g., ASCII or

HOW CORE STANDARDS CRITERIA ARE APPLIED TO ASSESSED CONNECTIVITY FRAMEWORKS

Unicode), the number representation (e.g., integer or floating point), and the field sizes and names. It also requires that the connectivity infrastructure encode the data on the wire in an unambiguous manner such that it is decoded correctly by the connectivity infrastructure independently of the implementation, computing platform, or programming language.

So, how does the new IIoT connectivity stack model juxtapose with current IIoT connectivity standards? A connectivity standard may span multiple layers of the IIoT connectivity stack; it may (or may not) provide all the functions of a layer; it may place different priorities on the typical considerations for each layer; and/or it may place different weights on various system architectural qualities.

The IICF defines a connectivity core standard as one that can allow end points of another connectivity to communicate through it without compromising the fidelity of the data

The full IICF is available at https://www.iiconsortium. org/IICF.htm. The chapter “How to Assess a Connectivity Technology” contains an assessment template that you can use to establish connectivity requirements and evaluate connectivity technology choices. Also, the annexes contain a starter catalog of detailed assessment templates that you can use to jump-start connectivity selection for your IIoT project.

or the quality of service. To share data from a proprietary or a domain-specific connectivity technology, one need only build a gateway to a core connectivity standard. Once the data is available over a core connectivity standard, it can be shared with endpoints on any other connectivity technology that has a gateway to that core connectivity standard.

Core connectivity standards are essential to enable integration of legacy and emerging connectivity technologies into a stable and long-term IIoT system architecture strategy. A few core connectivity standards suffice to cover the needs of IIoT systems across the functional domains and industries to attain the goal of horizontal interoperability.

The IICF defines the criteria for a connectivity framework to qualify as a core standard (see table above).

The IICF is the first extensive work by a major consortium that provides useful, tangible, and practical guidance for those looking to build IIoT solutions today. It establishes a starting point for IIoT architects and system designers looking to make sense of the connectivity options available today for IIoT projects. It takes designers from the highestlevel architectural considerations all the way down to very specific implementation choices.

Dr. Rajive Joshi is principal solution architect for RealTime Innovations (RTI, www.rti.com) and co-chair of the Industrial Internet Consortium’s connectivity task group (IIC, www.iiconsortium.org), and is lead author and editor of the IICF. Contact him at rajive@rti.com.

WWW.PLANTSERVICES.COM AUGUST 2017 25

WHAT WORKS

CMMS SETS STRUCTURE FOR SUCCESS A new CMMS (and patience) proves a lifeline for a casting company drowning in data When Joe Monson, a facilities manager at Clacka-

mas, OR-based casting company PCC Structurals (www. pccstructurals.com), arrived on the job 3.5 years ago, the CMMS in place wasn’t exactly being used to best effect.

“It was basically a giant electronic filing cabinet,” Monson says. The system hadn’t been updated in several years, he says, and there wasn’t an efficient way to run meaningful reports on work orders. “You had to just collect all the

”WE TOOK ABOUT 900 MANHOURS OUT OF THE YEAR ... IF WE HAVE MORE LABOR AVAILABLE, THEN WE’LL BE ABLE TO ADDRESS MORE PROBLEMS.” work orders you thought you might be interested in and read them, and then you had to sort of manually categorize them,” Monson says. “It was a lot.”

The CMMS, as a result, wasn’t helping the maintenance team evaluate the effectiveness of its existing PMs or take a critical look at unplanned work. “About 80% of our labor was spent on corrective action work orders,” says Monson. “It was basically impossible to schedule or to tell what was going to happen on any given day, because we were firefighting.”

Worse, the approximately 30-person maintenance team had spent about 15 years working within and mastering that system. Technicians had become “very disciplined in checking out parts to work orders and also in written descriptions of the problems and solutions,” but without a simple and effective way to work-order reports, it was difficult to tell what was working and what wasn’t.

Monson wanted big changes: “We had to try to flip the ratio of planned work to corrective work,” he says. That change would start with a more-disciplined and analytical approach to goal-setting – and a new CMMS. PCC Structurals chose a CMMS solution from eMaint (www.emaint.com, a Fluke company, as of 2016). The new CMMS offered plenty of capabilities in terms of navigating lists of work orders and running detailed work-order analyses, plus strong user support, Monson says. But beyond enhancing the maintenance department’s technical capabilities, he notes, switching to a new CMMS did something else.

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“It allowed us to draw a line in the sand and say, we’re going to put in a new CMMS system and try to do things differently,” Monson says. “That was important because otherwise we would have had to fight through a lot of legacy procedures.”

Monson also homed in on determining the metrics that would be the best indicators of the maintenance team’s success or failure. “For me the most important thing was defining one goal and then associating some metrics that would drive that goal,” he says. “Where we’ve landed now is that our goal is to maximize equipment availability to production.”

A year ago, when the new CMMS was ready to roll, Monson thought he and the maintenance team were as ready as they could be to make this concerted push to become a more-proactive, better-planned department. “We did training, we made modules, we did an audit of the system,” he says. Still, maintenance technicians cautioned that they weren’t going to really be able to tell how everything worked until they worked for real within the system.

Rollout of the new CMMS and associated initiatives designed to shift maintenance practices came and went, and... cue sad trombone. “We tried to accomplish a lot of changes in terms of how we wanted to change the maintenance department, and I would say about 98% of those desired changes or desired initiatives failed” at the outset, Monson says. “It was too much, too fast.”

In the 20/20 view of hindsight, Monson offers this reflection: “If I could go back in time and do it again, what I would have done is recreated extremely closely the system that we had before eMaint so that from a maintenance technician perspective, the shock or the difference between the two from a practical standpoint, from a day-to-day standpoint, was as small as possible.” The full eMaint CMMS offered flexibility such that dashboards and functionalities could have been tailored to allow for a more-seamless transition from the system the PCC Structurals team was familiar with – that just hadn’t been part of the plan for Monson and the implementation team.

“If we had just made the program easy to switch from one to the other on Day 1 and then let six months go by, we wouldn’t have had to deal with all the frustration of, ‘Oh, this is different, and I don’t know how to do this or that,’ ” Monson says. “And then we could have just let the

program speak for itself over the next six months.”

A year later, things are going decidedly more smoothly. “Now being a year into it, the maintenance leadership team, our leads, and our supervisors, who use the full accounts, are thinking of it very favorably,” Monson says of the full CMMS. “They’re seeing the ease of use and that it’s very powerful and they can do a lot. And they’re seeing that we can work with eMaint and make changes.”

As the plant looked to improve labor efficiency – some 18,000 work orders are completed a year – it set its sights on reducing PM frequency.

“We started to look at the yield on our PMs – how often did we get a pass?” Monson says. “And we used that as an indicator of, do I need to do this PM more often or less often? We created a Pareto chart of our top PM procedures in terms of cost, and then we looked at the yields of each of those procedures’ steps, and what we found was there was a great deal of PMs that we could reduce the frequency on. So we said, this was a weekly PM, but it passed for six months in a row, so we changed it to a biweekly or a monthly.”

To ensure that these PM reductions don’t “come back to haunt us,” says Monson, the team put in place control charts to monitor maintenance costs on a given asset. If costs and corrective work orders spike, PMs on that asset will be re-evaluated.

Capturing what Monson calls “low-hanging fruit” such as reducing PM frequency where appropriate led to quick results. “We took about 900 manhours out of the year,” he says.

Rather than reduce headcount in response, the plant created improvement teams to analyze persistent and problematic corrective actions. “We’ve freed up some time for maintenance technicians to contribute,” he says.

“We’ve got...some people who say: ‘You

know what? I’ve always thought that (a given practice) was a waste of time, and it’s been driving me nuts forever, and I’m glad it’s going away, and hey, let’s look over here.’ To me, that looks to be the start of a trend in terms of ‘Hey, we can take charge.’ ” This all is in service of Monson’s ultimate goal of maximum equipment availability, which previously had been a challenge to assess.

“What we’ve determined now is that...parts charges to a given asset and (technicians’) labor hours on a given asset” – which technicians were already accustomed to entering before the CMMS switch – “got us about 95% of the way there in terms of having a reliable needle to look at and to move,” he says. In other words: Maintenance spending and

labor now are used as a proxy for assessing equipment availability. “If we’re not spending any money on it, then we’re not working on it, and it’s probably available,” Monson says.

The new CMMS, as part of a broader push to analyze maintenance performance and look for improvement opportunities, is helping the PCC Structurals team “go back to our maintenance data and look at where we were working the most, where we were putting in all of our effort, and how do we reduce that,” says Monson.

“Because if we have more labor available, then we’ll be able to address more problems.” The shift to more planned and less reactive work is still a work in progress, but, Monson offers, “I think that we’re on the right track, for the first time.”

Gerald “Gerry” Bauer

President, EccoFab - Rockford, IL

 Sullair.com/GerrysStory

Reliability is everything

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In fact, it doesn’t think of anything but the job at hand.

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RELIABILITY / LUBRICATION

by Heinz P. Bloch, Process Machinery Consulting

Understand the science of lubrication to optimize your plant’s lubrication practices and lift reliability

Despite its unquestionable importance, lubrication science continues to be a neglected field. Because the nuances and implementation details of that science tend to be undervalued and misunderstood, lube application and selection methods often are antiquated and out of tune with today’s professed reliability thinking. As just one example, purchasing lubrication products from the lowest bidder has led to the use of products with inadequate additive formulations.

Fortunately, remedies are available in the form of intelligent specifications. Regardless of bearing type and lubrication method, avoiding lubrication errors is of great value from both a safety and a reliability perspective. Procedural shortcuts and lubrication mistakes often jeopardize equipment reliability and can prove very costly.

REGREASING SHIELDED BEARINGS

Of the billions of rolling element bearings in use in appliances, automobiles, and electric motors, probably 99% are grease-lubricated. The rest, we can assume, are sliding (also called “sleeve”) bearings. With few exceptions, all of these industrial bearings require lubricants as a separating barrier 28

AUGUST 2017 WWW.PLANTSERVICES.COM

between moving and stationary parts.

Having such a barrier will reduce friction and carry away heat.

Here’s a point that bears repeating: There is no single grease type that is best for every conceivable grease lubrication task. Likewise, no one grease replenishing method or procedure will prove superior to all others. Accordingly, a regreasing procedure must fit a particular bearing style, and an approved procedure should be followed for proper regreasing. To be regreasable, a bearing cannot have seals; regreasable bearings require bearing and housing configurations that allow replenishing of grease. Such bearings can have one or two shields or be designed as “open” bearings without shields.

Unfortunately, the incorrect claim that shielded bearings cannot be relubricated with mineral oil-based greases still persists. Most greases consist of approximately 85% oil, with the remaining portion made up of soap and a small amount of additives. There is a body of literature explaining that the oil portion of the grease “bleeds” or “seeps”

through the gap between the shields and the bearing inner ring. Seepage can also be called capillary action, whereby the oil leaves the soap and wets out – which is to say the oil provides a lubricant film or coating on the rolling elements.

Shielded bearings can be regreased as long as a volume of grease is located adjacent to the bearing shield and the grease is the proper consistency for the application. This means that the bearing’s operating environment must be considered; the suitability of an operating environment depends on bearing housing geometry, shaft speed, bearing temperature, and more.

It is widely known that bearing and lubrication distress are the two primary maintenance items in electric motors; both will greatly affect uptime. That said, a proactive and reliability-focused facility will add bearing and lubrication details to the usual motor procurement specifications that define voltage, speed, power output, service factor, insulation classification, and other parameters. Moreover, and in view of bearing and lubrication concerns, competent reliability professionals at best-in-class facilities insist that maintenance technicians use checklists. These checklists explain the letter code associated with a motor’s drive end (“DE”) and non-drive end (“NDE”). Unless the DE and NDE bearings are identical, each end may require different regreasing routines, and the checklists should contain relevant specifics.

GET THE RIGHT GREASE TO SAVE $$$

Virtually any substance known to man is affected by temperature changes. Materials usually expand as they grow hot and contract as they become cold. A scientist can rightly point to a few exceptions, but the rule certainly applies to industrial lubricants. This is where grease specifications take on importance. Although “all-purpose grease” may be suitable for horse-drawn carriages, it should not be used at plants and facilities intending to keep machines reliable.

You may think your facility wouldn’t need these reminders, but industry continues to experience equipment and component failures that could have been avoided by simple root-cause analysis and appropriate specification follow-up. A motor shaft failure at a U.S. power plant will illustrate the point: A chain of events commenced when several electric motors in cold weather experienced severe bearing failures. These bearing distress events were followed in at least one case by a massive shaft failure. A team of investigators attributed these incidents to stiff grease not reaching the bearings. In response, a government regulatory agency sent out an expensive advisory message. It advocated that, henceforth, electric motor bearing replacement should become part of time-based preventive maintenance. I don’t recall any suggestions to perform predictive maintenance (PdM) or ensure use of the right grease for the particular environment.

In particular, there didn’t seem to be any effort to investigate why many thousands of electric motors operate flawlessly in the more-severe outdoor crude-oil gathering and refining environments of Canada and other worldwide locations north of the 49th parallel. Nor, it seems, did anyone bother to ask why many of the world’s most profitable paper mills in Finland, Sweden, and Germany use automated periodic regreasing on thousands of pumps and electric motors. It would have been easy to find the answer: WWW.PLANTSERVICES.COM AUGUST 2017 29

RELIABILITY / LUBRICATION

The many successful locations use greases with the proper viscosity.

There are nine National Lubricating Grease Institute viscosities; the lowest of these, NLGI Grade 000, exhibits the flowability of cooking oil. The highest of the nine grades, NLGI Grade 6, approaches the consistency of cheddar cheese. Of course, industrial greases must be applied in accordance with proven procedures.

Many good procedures date back to the 1960s; these are detailed in and are readily accessible in two books I co-authored, “Practical Lubrication for Industrial Facilities” (with Kenneth Bannister) and “Pump User’s Handbook: Life Extension” (with Alan Budris).

The importance of correct regreasing procedures can’t be overstated.

Experiments conducted in a Texas refi nery shop, for example, have shown that leaving a grease drain plug in place during greasing can yield pressures as high as 15,000 psi (105 kPa) in electric motor bearing housings. At these pressures, shields will be pushed into the rolling elements and cause almost instant failure. Rapid grease deterioration also can be caused by mixing incompatible greases or using contaminated products. Buying sealed bearings and leaving them alone is indeed superior to buying regreasable bearings and then mistreating or abusing them.

On the other hand, by simply implementing correct practices, bestin-class plants manage to prevent both failure-induced downtime and unjustifiable expenditures related to precautionary time-based bearing changeouts.

It’s thus of immense value to determine in a given use case whether the best bearing and lubricant option has been selected. Next, it’s vital to establish whether the application meets the load and speed criteria for periodic and correct regreasing and whether 30

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By simply implementing correct practices, best-in-class plants manage to prevent both failure-induced downtime and unjustifiable expenditures related to precautionary time-based bearing changeouts. the correct grease formulation has been chosen. Opinions and guesswork have no place here.

GREASE REPLENISHMENT AND RELIABILITY ENGINEERING

Experienced bearing manufacturers agree that single-shielded bearings should be installed with the shield facing the grease cavity. The bearing manufacturer intends that the shield in Figure 1 will serve as a metering orifice. The oil constituent in a grease must bleed through this gap, and the shield is there to prevent overgreasing.

Selecting double-shielded radial deepgroove bearings is encouraged because one of the shields will then always be adjacent to the grease reservoir. Oil will “bleed” through the gap by capillary action and not by force. Recall that oil “bleeding” into the raceways is what bearing designers intended.

Nonhydrocarbon grease formulations, although cost-justified in certain fully sealed bearings, are not well-known and are underused. It’s important to understand the applications where nonhydrocarbon PFPE/ PTFE (or specific advanced synthesized hydrocarbon, collectively called “synthetics”) is of great importance.

There will never be a substitute for experience; accordingly, not everyone working for a manufacturer will outshine an observant user. And the goals and aspirations of bearing providers are not necessarily aligned with those of equipment users and reliability professionals. So, what should be the course of action for this latter group?

Guidelines have evolved; the following current guidelines reflect the experiences of users and manufacturers: • Sealed (nonregreasable) bearings are preferred in continuous-duty applications as long as the product of the bearing bore diameter “D” in mm and speed “N” in RPM does not exceed 80,000.

• Shielded (regreasable) bearings are considered the best choice for light to medium loads in the DN range from 108,000 to 300,000, and users can opt for either sealed or shielded configurations in the “gray” DN range from 80,000 to 108,000.

• Once a DN-value of 300,000 is exceeded, liquid oil lubrication is normally preferred over grease.

At one major U.S. manufacturer, there were 156 bearing-related repair incidents per 1,000 electric motors per year, while an affi liated refinery experienced only 18 incidents on very similar motors lubricated with the exact same grease. Three installations in the Middle East averaged 14 replacement events per 1,000 motors per year. Their motor specification insisted on the use of regreasable bearings, and the maintenance technicians at the three facilities always removed the drain plug when replenishing grease. Removing the grease drain plug (item 2 in Figure 1) prevents overgreasing and allows spent grease to be expelled. Adding the pipe extension takes away the human element of having to remember that a drain plug, if used, would have to be removed and reinserted as part of a labor-intensive (and now consid-

For many plants that adhere to grease lubrication, Figure 2 shows the best solution from technical acceptability and also from “not wanting to argue with my workers” points of view. Some companies opt to emphasize accountability and insist on staffers following instructions. We found out how well this approach worked in the United Arab Emirates, where a large refinery reported replacing seven bearings per 1,000 electric motors per year. When asked what magic grease formulation the refinery was using, a senior manager explained that his workers simply followed instructions and that grease-related bearing failures are infrequent. In other words, the technicians at that refinery know what bearings they have; they remove drain plugs; they regrease with the prescribed amount of grease; and then

ered outdated) conventional regreasing routine.

Why the dramatic difference in repair incidents? At the 156 incidents per 1,000 motors per year location, periodic grease replenishment was done with the drain plug left in place. New grease tended to force the spent grease into open, or nonshielded, bearings; in some cases, new grease under pressure deflected or even deformed the shields of shielded bearings. In sharp contrast, the 18 incidents per 1,000 motors per year location saw to it that drain plugs were removed during regreasing. Using these documented findings and assuming 2,000 electric motors at a large refinery or paper mill, proper regreasing could thus avoid 276 bearing replacement incidents. At $4,000 per incident, proper regreasing would save in excess of $1 million per year.

1

1 LUBRICATION ENTRY 2 DRAIN 3 SHAFT 4 BEARING 5 INNER CAP

5

4

5

4

1 3

6 BRACKET

3 Single-shield motor bearing with shield facing the grease cavity

6 2 6

1 LUBRICATION ENTRY 2 DRAIN 3 SHAFT 4 BEARING

2

5 INNER CUP 6 BRACKET

Figure 1. (left) A single-shielded bearing. Note that the grease reservoir is next to the shield; the addition of lubricant to the original supply takes place by seepage of oil from the grease and by a small amount of grease being forced through the clearance in the shield.

Figure 2. (right) A double-shielded bearing. The housing plug is replaced by hard pipe.

When regreasing, new grease displaces spent grease in the pipe, and the permanent drain opening prevents overpressuring.

Source: J.R. Autenrieth, Motor Lubrication Guidelines, Phillips Petroleum, Sweeney, TX, c.1980

they move on to do the next electric motor. After allowing two to three hours for grease to settle, a worker returns and reinserts each drain plug.

There’s no substitute for following a proper work execution procedure.

Good supervision and managing with integrity prevent failures and generate higher profits. Using an open drain pipe (see Figure 2) instead of a drain plug totally eliminates the possibility of overpressuring as a result of human error. Call it ingenuity at work!

NONHYDROCARBON GREASES MAKE INROADS

As you read bearing manufacturers’ guidelines and look at many published charts, remember that almost every pre-2015 publication dealing with relubrication refers to mineraloil-based greases. Mineral oils are hydrocarbons, and while still cost-effective in a wide range of applications, perfluoropolyether (PFPE) greases should also be considered. PFPEs are formulated with substances other than hydrocarbons, primarily Teflon®. They have extremely low volatility thanks to their long carbon chains; low volatility prevents greases from evaporating. Figures 3 and 4 show how these greases can extend the life of sealed bearings or allow operating certain fully sealed bearings with larger diameters (or at higher speeds) than was customary with predecessor mineral oil-based greases.

The original development of high-performance PFPE lubricants (see Figure 4) probably dates back to the 1960s. These developments were both necessitated and accelerated by aerospace and aviation markets where lubrication at the extremes of low and high temperatures was far more important than it would be in the average industrial environment.

Beyond aviation and aerospace, PFPEs have served admirably whenever their higher initial cost was overcome by the WWW.PLANTSERVICES.COM AUGUST 2017 31

RELIABILITY / LUBRICATION

WEIBULL PROBABILITY PLOT

% Failure

included lives: L10, L50 confidence interval: 90% 2-sided 99 95 90 80 70 60 50 40 30 20

5 L10=101

2

L10=310

L10=6445

1 2

3

4 5

102

2

3 4

5

103

2

3

4 5

104

Life (Hours) Conventional Polyurea

Shear-Stable Polyurea

PFPE-PTFE

Figure 3. The projected L10 life of PFPE-PTFE greases substantially exceeds that of mineral oil-based greases.

ASTM D3336 – GREASE LIFE IN BALL BEARINGS 100,000

Test Duration (Hours)

+25,036

10,000

5560

2076

1,000 318

552 311

100 175

180

185

190

195

200

205

210

215

220

Temperature (°C) PFPE-PTFE

Shear-Stable Polyurea

Conventional Polyurea

Li-Complex

Figure 4. Weibull probability plot for modern PFPE-PTFE grease formulations.

Source: Boulden Company, Conshohocken, PA; also Boulden International, Ellange, Luxembourg

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225

far-more-important need to consistently meet or exceed performance expectations.

Solid cost justification for PFPEs has recently become available. One example comes from a large Canadian paper mill that struggled with its grease-lubricated electric motor bearings. When the mill opted to dispense with relubrication of electric motor bearings by purchasing and converting to PFPE grease-fi lled (sealed, lifetime-lubricated) bearings, its electric motor bearing life improved drastically. The savings greatly outweighed the incremental cost of PFPE over premium-grade mineraloil-based greases.

PFPE greases present an interesting lubrication alternative which was studied and fully validated at smaller and/or non-HPI facilities in recent years. It was found that developments in grease technology can greatly extend the application range traditionally associated with “life-time” lubrication in electric motor bearings.

Of course this favorable experience with PFPE-PTFE may not apply to every situation and careful follow-up is always recommended. Also, these greases cannot be mixed with even trace quantities of traditional grease types.

Staying up to date on technology is one of the reliability engineer’s principal job functions. With respect to grease lubrication for electric motors, sealed bearings (lifetime lubricated bearings) are highly appropriate for the typical appliance motor. Conversely, regreasable bearings are preferred for the majority of larger motors in industrial facilities – for example, a 50 kW electric motor driving the average refinery process pump. These are rules of thumb; there are exceptions.

Extending sealed bearing applications by using a very expensive grease can indeed make economic sense.

LIQUID OIL LUBRICATION: THE LATEST

Oil, of course, is the most widely used industrial liquid lubricant. Oils are broadly categorized as either mineral or synthetic. The term “synthetic” usually refers to synthesized hydrocarbons, although non-hydrocarbon synthetic oils do exist and are available for highly specialized applications. Among these are aerospace environments and other situations where vacuum conditions and temperature extremes are encountered.

Lubricating oils are quite easily and reliably applied to rolling element (“antifriction”) bearings as an oil mist.

Neither oil rings nor constant-level lubricators are used in pumps and drivers connected to plantwide oil mist systems.

Oil mist is an atomized amount of oil carried or “suspended” in a volume of pressurized dry air. The oil mist, actually a ratio of one volume of oil suspended or carried in 200,000 volumes of clean, dry air, moves in a piping system (header).

The point of origin is usually a simple mixing valve (the oil mist generator), connected to this header. Branch lines often feed oil mist to hundreds of rolling elements in the many pumps and drivers connected to a plantwide system.

At standstill or while on standby, pump and driver bearings are preserved by the surrounding oil mist, which exists in the bearing housing space at a pressure just barely higher than ambient. These pump and driver bearings are lubricated from the time when atomized oil globules join (or “wet out”) to become larger oil droplets. This joining-into-largedroplets starts whenever the equipment shafts rotate, which is when small globules come into contact with each other and start coating the bearing elements Except for oil mist, oil application through spray nozzles (see Figure 5) is more reliable and less labor-intensive than any other oil application method. Note that Figure 5 reflects the two top application methods, pressurized liquid oil and atomized oil mixed with air. The latter is commonly known as oil mist. The illustration shows the path oil spray and/or oil mist should take through the bearings. This application method is known to optimize heat removal and reduce friction.

Plantwide oil mist systems include distribution headers wherein atomized oil is suspended in clean carrier air. At the destination rolling element bearings (usually process pump bearings and the bearing housings of their electric motor drivers), the oil mist is reclassified in a nozzle or orifice-like bushing. The term “reclassifier” was chosen because part of the atomized oil is converted (reclassified) into an oil spray. However, no liquid oil would reside in the bearing housing; instead, spent oil and carrier air would leave or be withdrawn from the drain port at the bottom of the bearing housing in Figure 5.

Figure 5. An oil spray is given the highest performance ranking, as is oil mist applied from locations between the bearing housing protector seal and the bearing.

Source: AESSEAL Inc., Rotherham, U.K., and Rockford, TN

An oil spray configuration would start with a small volume of liquid oil reaching from 5 to 7 o’clock inside the same bearing housing. A small pump’s intake (not shown here) would be piped to the drain port and impart pressure to this oil. The pressurized oil would travel to the spray nozzles shown in Figure 5. Both oil mist and oil spray applications can take credit for effective heat removal and lower frictional losses, and both should be taken into account when performing cost justification analyses.

As in performing cost justification studies, don’t overlook the fact that tens of thousands of electric motor bearings have been running for decades in some electric motors in U.S. locations. The results of all-encompassing analyses may pleasantly surprise you.

Heinz P. Bloch, P.E., is owner of Process Machinery Consulting in Westminster, CO, and the author of close to 700 articles and 20 books, including “Pump User’s Handbook — Life Extension” and “Practical Lubrication for Industrial Facilities.” Some of his work has been translated into five foreign languages, and Bloch has seven machinery-related patents to his credit. He is an ASME Life Fellow and was one of the original Texas A&M University Pump Symposium advisory board members. Contact him at heinzpbloch@gmail.com.

WWW.PLANTSERVICES.COM AUGUST 2017 33

RELIABILITY / COMPRESSED AIR

by Ron Marshall, certified engineering technologist

New data collection and storage functions promise to deliver smarter control and better efficiency One of the notable highlights of this yearâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Hannover Messe trade show

Source: Sullair

in Hannover, Germany, was a focus on enhanced efficiency and reliability of compressed air systems. Product improvements, including wireless and cellular communications links, were showcased seemingly everywhere, from the most complicated compressor controllers to lowly but important condensate drains. Particularly exciting developments were found in the control and monitoring of air compressors.

Figure 1. Sullair AirLinx display

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Source: Kaeser Compressors

Compressor controls and sequencing controllers have been steadily advancing over the years from simple relay logic to complicated microprocessor-based systems. These devices typically operate on an internal design logic that will control compressors based on preprogrammed set points, with the control making a change to system operation based on one or more parameters that might vary past a programmed limit. These controls have various other functions to monitor and report faults in the system or to remind operators when maintenance is due based on some internal timer function.

At Hannover, four companies featured noteworthy product developments. All four have developed or enhanced control, analysis, and communications tools that can help compressed air users keep their system running reliably and at the highest efficiency.

Sullair (www.sullair.com) announced a communications and monitoring system called Sullair AirLinx (see Figure 1). Released in conjunction with the launch of the company’s newly redesigned LS90-110 range of compressors, the system provides a cellular data link from each compressor controller to a cloud database. This link allows remote monitoring of key compressor parameters by computer, tablet, or smartphone, and, if desired, immediate reporting of problems to key plant personnel.

On-board the redesigned compressors is a new Sullair Touch Screen controller that provides enhanced visualization of all compressor internal conditions and that features a redesigned compressor sequencer that can efficiently control a group of compressors with similar controls. This controller is smart enough to take control of onboard spiral-valve variable-capacity controls (if present), and in a system of multiple compressors, it will coordinate multiple spiral valves to give VSD-like control on a single pressure set point. This allows customers with compressors located in extreme

Figure 2. Kaeser Compressors Sigma Air Manager 4.0

environments that would not allow the installation of VSD controls to have excellent pressure regulation and optimum compressed air system efficiency.

Kaeser Compressors (www. us.kaeser.com) had its enhanced Sigma Air Manager 4.0 on display (see Figure 2). Operating within a Kaeser Sigma Network, this control system offers many enhanced communications and data analysis features. The network connects all site compressors together, forming a high-speed data highway within the plant that provides optimum control and monitoring of connected compressors. Designed with user interests in mind, the controller is shipped preprogrammed to the customer, and when installed, it will “learn” the characteristics of the system, such as storage volumes and compressor response times. Based on this information, the controller will take things like pressure rate of change, compressor idle time, compressor unloaded kW, and unit cycle times and use this information to make decisions about how to control compressors to provide optimum operating characteristics.

This provides not a fixed pressure band as with traditional controllers but a flexible band that works within set user defined minimum and maximum limits. The network can be connected

to a Kaeser cloud server that collects key system data allowing compressed air users to monitor their systems via any smart internet connected device.

Alerts can be automatically sent to compressor operators and service personnel if parameters cross preset limits.

Energair Solutions from CMC (www.energair.com) announced its new product, called the Compressor Gate (see Figure 3). This stand-alone product will initially not control compressors but is designed to work to monitor any brand and type of compressor to provide affordable continuous monitoring via broadband cellular link of key compressor parameters.

The keys to the system are 4G-linked communications modules that are installed within each compressor as a retrofit. These modules capture parameters like operating status, temperatures, pressures, and alarms and send them to a database server.

The company also offers a module that takes three-phase power readings of the compressor input – it’s one of a few companies that uses actual measurements rather than calculated values for monitoring purposes. As with other vendors’ offerings, the data resides in a cloud database that can be accessed from anywhere in the world. Corporate energy managers and key operating personnel will be able to query their WWW.PLANTSERVICES.COM AUGUST 2017 35

Source: Energair

RELIABILITY / COMPRESSED AIR

Figure 3. Energair Solutions Compressor Gate

connected sites worldwide to track energy performance, reliability, and maintenance functions to be able to keep their systems running smoothly.

The company also offers compressor controllers and a line of compressed air auditing instruments called SCADAR that offers cloud-based data processing and automated reporting to help company energy auditors make sense of the collected data.

Airleader (www.airleader.us), a family-owned German company, showcased its Airleader master control and online monitoring system (see Figure 4). The company has developed a new touch-screen and wireless interface and adapted it to an already highly developed control system. Always ahead of the curve, Airleader has integrated data collection and offered cloud-based reporting as a key part of their portfolio for many years. The controller system features an in-plant interface that connects to an Ethernet system so the user can see real-time performance of their system via web page.

Also, a connection to a cloud-based server, either through a company firewall or a broadband cellular con36

AUGUST 2017 WWW.PLANTSERVICES.COM

nection, allows the collection and uploading of key system data. This allows for very useful analysis and reporting of system problems, pending maintenance needs, and system energy efficiency. This control system is designed to work with any make and model of compressor and will monitor other system components like flow meters, kW meters, and air dryers. Interface to variable capacity controllers such as spiral valves, turn valves, and poppet valves is also possible. Airleader also offers a device that can be installed on a compressed air system to monitor system operation and determine if a compressor controller is warranted. Data taken from this device can be used, for example, to find areas of inefficiency, measure leaks, and troubleshoot problems, all functions the control and monitoring system does on a permanent basis.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN TO THE USER?

These new enhancements will have a significant impact on the compressed air user. In compressed air systems, like other systems, measurement of important parameters is key. “Our

motto is if you don’t monitor it, you can’t manage it.” says Jan Hoetzel, manager of SIGA Development, the distributor of Airleader compressed air management systems in North America. “That’s why we provide a web server with all of our systems that makes the operation of the compressed air system transparent to user.

Knowing how the system is operating opens the eyes of the user to system inefficiency, takes the uncertainty out of future improvement projects, and makes management more willing to go the next step in correcting their system operation.”

But simply monitoring a system is not always the final answer. “A lot of customers monitor their systems but never look at the data,” notes David Booth, system specialist at Sullair.

“We’ve found that a quick scan of the system data by system experts at about a dozen of our beta sites showed really obvious problems, like VSDs running in base load. One site saved about $40,000 per year by simply readjusting the parameters.”

Intelligently using the data can yield big savings. “We installed a master con-

“One of our customers was being encouraged to purchase a new compressor to solve a shortage of compressed air,” says Jan Hoetzel, “but since data was available from our monitoring system, the company controller in the finance department got interested in the plant leakage flow numbers.” Hoetzel continues: “Through his efforts and his ongoing pressure to reduce this waste and implement other system improvements, the company was able to reduce their flow from 3,500 cfm to 2,300 cfm and optimize compressor control, saving them about half a million dollars in operating costs.”

These are quite impressive results.

Hoetzel tells of another third-partyverified installation that saved 84% thanks to the more-efficient control of the system compressors. Having system data available after the compressor control system was installed helped save an additional 71% of the remainder once the system’s operation could be permanently monitored.

“System monitoring is very important,” says Jarno Manzke, technical director at Kaeser Compressors. “A wire manufacturer allowed us to monitor their compressor, and the resulting project saved $45,000 per year. The compres-

Source: Airleader

troller on five compressors, four FS and one VSD, located in five different areas across an agriculture implement plant,” explains Nicolas De Deken, COO of Energair Solutions. “While the master controller was performing as it should using fixed-speed compressors only as base load (fully loaded) in combination with the VSD trimming, permanent monitoring of pressures in the different areas showed that due to inadequate piping, the VSD had to run at 125 psi to maintain a 100 psi minimum pressure throughout the plant.” He continues: “This analysis allowed us to calculate the ROI of investing in better piping, through a closed loop, and after the new piping has been installed, the VSD is now running at 105 psi, providing additional energy savings.”

The data collected from such systems is really useful to management, especially if there is a corporate energy management system in place.

ISO 50001, for example, might lead the company to designate the compressed air system as a significant energy user (SEU). Once an SEU is identified, the company managers must then implement an energy tracking strategy. This is where having a compressed air monitoring system becomes important.

Figure 4. Airleader master controller and online monitoring system

sor monitoring system that was installed helped verify the results because it collected all the necessary information.”

Monitoring of the data can be extremely effective in improving systems and keeping efficiency as high as possible, but data collection and storage provides other opportunities, too, not only in verification of savings but also with respect to system reliability and predictive maintenance.

“We are collecting a large amount of data about every connected compressor,” Manzke says. “This allows our company to do some data mining that will help us, for example, predict future compressor air end failures before they happen. Use of the data will allow us to recognize changing conditions inside our compressors and notify service personnel and compressor operators well before major damage to the compressor takes place.”

All of the companies interviewed indicated they were planning to use database information to further enhance system monitoring’s benefits for their customers. Added Manzke: “We’ve developed a system that tirelessly monitors the data, and once programmed with special algorithms, can flag many reliability- and maintenance-related issues for our system experts to review.

And our control system currently works like a chess computer, looking ahead and simulating possible better compressed air system operation. If system monitoring identifies improvements that can be made, then our personnel will better be able to contact our customers with a solution.”

Before retiring in 2016, Ron Marshall was the industrial compressed air systems expert at Manitoba Hydro, where he worked for 38 years. His efforts supported the organization’s Power Smart Performance Optimization Program, and he now operates his own compressed air energy efficiency consulting firm and is a member of the project development committee at the Compressed Air Challenge.

WWW.PLANTSERVICES.COM AUGUST 2017 37

RELIABILITY / CMRP OF THE YEAR

CMRP Rising Leader of the Year:

Robert Bishop One secret to helping your team run more efficiently and effectively?

Recognize what you can learn from others.

Robert Bishop, CMRP, CRL, is plant manager at Toronto-based Chemtrade’s Syracuse, NY, sodium nitrite manufacturing plant. Last fall, the Society for Maintenance and Reliability Professionals (SMRP) named him one of the society’s two CMRP of the Year recipients; he was recognized in the Rising Leader category. Previously the manager of maintenance and reliability at Bristol-Myers Squibb Co., Bishop, who also chairs SMRP’s Pharma and Biotech Shared Interest Group, spoke with Plant Services about the compliance challenges in the pharmaceutical and food and beverage industries as well as the importance of strengthening interdepartment communication and collaboration.

PS You have a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering from the University of Rochester and a master’s in bioengineering from Syracuse University – how did that background help lead you to a role as a maintenance and reliability manager at a pharmaceutical company like Bristol-Myers Squibb?

RB I’ve always been an equipment-type person. I always feel comfortable around equipment. Like, this weekend I’ll be changing the brakes on my car. I decided to go for my undergraduate degree at the University of Rochester – I put myself in a little bit of an uncomfortable place because UR is more of a theory than an application type of school. I knew that going in, and I enjoyed the challenge of that. When I got out of school, with a mechanical engineering degree, you can pretty much do anything, which is kind of a challenge. I ended up working for a company in Rochester. That gave me exposure to the pharmaceutical industry, and it didn’t take me long to realize that I wanted to work in the pharmaceuti38

AUGUST 2017 WWW.PLANTSERVICES.COM

cal industry, and so I ended up going to work for Wyeth Pharmaceuticals.

I was still involved in the equipment side but on more of the compliance end, so computer validation, equipment qualification, cleaning validation (to ensure removal of residues from the pharmaceutical production process) and that kind of thing.

Back in ’06, Wyeth decided they were either going to close or sell the site that I worked at, so that prompted me to look proactively and not wait for that to happen. I ended up in Syracuse, New York (and at Bristol-Myers Squibb). So I was still dealing with equipment qualification, cleaning validation, that side of things – a lot of the compliance aspect – but I’ve always worked in more of a facilities and engineering group.

PS How did working in the highly regulated pharmaceutical sector, with its strict compliance reporting requirements, affect your thinking about and approach to reliability?

RB Within the pharmaceutical world, and I think if you carry it to food and beverages, too, a lot of the challenges have to do with making sure that you have the right certification in place. Having to deal with the documentation creates a mentality where your thought processes are more through, your documentation is more thorough, and so as you go through any kind of project, you tend to think it out a little bit more. When you do investigations, for example, if you have an equipment failure or something, those investigations tend to be more of a true root-cause (type of investigation). I would say that it’s still a step below

a nuclear (facility) or industries like airlines, places where failure is not acceptable at all. Having a piece of equipment fail in a food or pharmaceutical type of environment doesn’t usually result in an injury to people. It’s usually an injury to your bottom line. Having that documentation (requirement), although it is a challenge, I think that it is a very unique benefit to those industries.

PS You’ve made a move into the food and beverage world and are taking on a new position as plant manager – what challenges and opportunities do you see in your new role?

RB Bringing, you know, the history that I have and applying some of those thought processes within a different context.

Anytime you (shift) from one paradigm to another, making sure that you don’t assume that your experiences or your culture that you’re used to is better. You have to assess the culture where you’re going; you have to make sure that you have a thorough understanding before you start changing things on a whim. You have to make those decisions about where (potential) changes are and possibly admitting to yourself that a change isn’t necessary in some cases.

Some of my experiences in the past have led me to go very in-depth when it comes to some of the documentation. So for example in an equipment failure, historically I might have gone through and done Ishikawa [cause-and-effect] diagrams and 5 Whys and done a formal (investigation) that could end up taking 50 to 100 hours’ worth of people’s time to complete that investigation. That’s costly to do. And in reality a lot of times, a couple hours, two or three hours, without the rigor around it, can still give you that gut feeling and get you very close to the same endpoint. And so I think not necessarily not doing an investigation but more about the level that you take that investigation; I think that’s an example of where I went ahead and changed my expectation to still do the investigation to get to that (end)point but not necessarily through the same rigor.

PS In addition to your new role at Chemtrade, you’re also leading reliability classes for the professional development program in the University of Wisconsin’s engineering department, right?

RB I am. We just wrapped up a class about two weeks ago.

We did our first online class, which was really interesting for me. It was a night class, an introduction to predictive technologies, with some of the materials prerecorded, some of those online live. Currently I’ve (also) been going out twice a year to teach a class in person.

PS Do you know the makeup of your classes? Is it more younger people getting into the field or mid-career people looking to expand their skill set?

RB It’s a mixture. I will say that last year, I was giving the predictive class, the in-person lab, and one of the gentlemen in the class had about 30 years of experience with vibration and he was Level III certified, so sometimes I learn more from the students. It’s a really enjoyable experience to get out and have those conversations. You walk out with quite a bit of increased knowledge.

SMRP CONFERENCE

Join Plant Services Editor-in-Chief Thomas Wilk and meet more than 1,000 other maintenance, reliability, and physical asset management professionals at SMRP’s 25th Annual Conference, taking place Oct. 16–19 in Kansas City.

For more information and to register, visit smrp.org/conference

WWW.PLANTSERVICES.COM AUGUST 2017 39

RELIABILITY / CMRP OF THE YEAR

PS What are some things that you’ve learned teaching that you’ve applied to your work or vice-versa?

RB Probably the biggest thing is making sure that you get engagement. I’m an engineer; I think like an engineer. I have always been that way. I tend to (approach things like), “Here’s the facts I want to get across.” But some of that doesn’t necessarily equate to digestion of that information.

So recognizing when someone in a meeting or when parts of the class start to drift and bringing them back into the discussion (is key). People skills can be very helpful just in your normal day-to-day meetings and things.

PS Do you have specific goals now that you’d like to

accomplish? What’s next for you?

RB I do. I came over to maintenance and reliability in June of 2012, and my boss pushed me from Day 1 to take the exam. I thought, you know, let me get settled in a while. I got the right books and I started studying, and then around the end of the year, he said, “You know, we need you to sign up for the exam.” And I said, “Well, I think I’m almost ready.”

And then when we got to the middle of the first quarter, he said, “We’re going to pick a date right now. Let’s go and do it together.” And that was awesome because I would have delayed it further. So I ended up taking it that spring of 2013. I’ve since become a proctor for the exam.

PS What has CMRP certification meant to you?

RB My biggest goal over the last, you know, five or six years has been to really change culture. We can write all the procedures run every day, implement as RB I’m really looking forward to a lot many job plans and PMs as we want, and of things, namely to learning the so on. But it’s the people at the end of the business side of things better. I’ve Certification day that mean the most. always interacted with people within is something And so to me, having the credibility finance or sales or this or that, but to that I think behind the CMRP certification has actually own some of that responsibilgiven me the ability to stand in front ity now and to come in and learn just a people need to of a group and say, “Come along this new side of the business within a new try for no matter journey with me. Listen to where I can industry for me, those kinds of things what your take us,” whether that’s from managing are very appealing. discipline is. my own group or sitting in front of a cross-functional group and saying, look, PS You’re not at 30 or 40 years of you know, you as operations have a lot experience in the field yet (ed’s note: to gain from understanding the project engineer’s role and Bishop is 41), but what evolution have you seen in terms of what their inputs and outputs are, and how what you give validation, equipment qualification, etc.? them influences a project.

It’s about breaking down those silos. You know, you don’t RB A lot of the changes that we’ve seen tie back to have to understand how to be a project engineer. You have to efficiency. Making the process easier while at the same understand what that project engineer’s main responsibilitime maintaining the robustness level that you need to ties are, where they’re getting their information, and how have from a documentation standpoint. When I first that influences the project they run. People believe me when started, (it was) you go through and do all your commisI start going down that road because of the certification. sioning, and then the commissioning team would hand off Certification is something that I think people need to try the project to validation, and validation would take over. for no matter what your discipline is. There are professional And one group might do IT work and information stuff, certifications out there for all of us. You know, if you happen and then somebody else is coming in to do some testing, to be in maintenance and reliability, the CMRP certification and then a whole other group will come in to do the is obviously a very appropriate one. performance side of things. Integration of those pieces, What I will say, too, that the awards that are out there too, leveraging the work that earlier groups have done, docufor self-improvement programs really help us as maintenance menting stuff correctly so we don’t have to repeat it – efand reliability professionals to get the attention of our organificiency has been the biggest thing. At the end of the day, zations, right. It’s very easy for our organization to lose focus our goal is to make sure that this equipment does what it’s on maintenance and reliability, to not give us the support and supposed to do, when it’s supposed to, and that we know the attention that really is due because they don’t understand what’s there and that we have a management-of-change how it impacts down the line. And so things like the CMRP process around it. That goal doesn’t change over time, but of the Year Award really allow us to get the audience and the how we accomplish it does. attention with our organizations to help push that one further step that we wouldn’t have without it.

PS Do you remember when you took your CMRP exam?

40

AUGUST 2017 WWW.PLANTSERVICES.COM

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OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE / CHANGE MANAGEMENT

by Cliff Williams, People and Processes Inc.

An understanding of different personality and communication styles can have a bigger impact on progress at your plant than you might think As we go about the business and busy-ness of our jobs, we too often fail to recognize and embrace the differences in the people around us – different skill sets, different attitudes, different points of view, different backgrounds, and even different values. If we look our organizations or even a given department as one-dimensional, then we miss out on opportunities to engage with people, and we’ll never reach our full potential. I truly believe in this, but I realize that this kind of engagement isn’t always easy to do, and it’s not always easy to recognize its importance. I have changed jobs numerous times, but I have only ever “quit” once – I’ve moved to a better position or moved ahead of anticipated plant closures, but only once did I quit just to get away – and it was all because of not recognizing differences.

Here’s the story: I was working for an organization that I had really looked forward to joining – for years it had been known as an inclusive, engaging, empowering organization that really focused on its people. There was even a hotline to the corporate office that employees who had a complaint or a suggestion could call and be guaranteed a reply. The organization’s reputation was unblemished, and I was glad when I was approached to join. Even though the hiring process was somewhat convoluted – it took two months and included two aptitude tests – I was excited and figured the process was so complicated because the company wanted to ensure that it was hiring the right people. What I didn’t know was that the private organization’s owner had passed away and his family had brought in outside help to run the business.

I started out full of enthusiasm, visiting the plant twice before my start date to meet my new co-workers and interview the leaders of the departments I would oversee to get a feel for what the challenges would be. It didn’t take me long, however, to realize that things were not as I had imagined.

A RUDE AWAKENING

The people who were working with me in the maintenance and reliability department were pretty good, though they were somewhat hesitant to take risks and consistently tried to deflect responsibility. The interactions with my boss and my peers troubled me – there wasn’t any inclusiveness, and my peers (most of them) seemed all too happy to pile blame on anyone they could. The reason for this became apparent quickly: Anyone who accepted blame was told by my boss to 42

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stay after the morning meeting. The day came when I was told to stay back, and when the others had left, my boss went into a rant and screamed for an explanation as to why what had happened had happened. As I learned, he didn’t seem to accept an explanation for anything that he considered to be an “excuse,” even when the reason was valid, and he wouldn’t stop ranting until you fully accepted responsibility and told him you would develop a solution – even if the matter was outside of your control. Most of my peers took the same approach with their groups. When I talked with the one exception, the production manager, he told me that he had been with the organization for quite a while and that most of the other leaders had been chosen recently by my boss. He told me of the great times they had under the old owner and how things had changed drastically under the new regime – on one recent occasion, a visitor from corporate had ranted about the slow progress being made on a company-wide initiative. The production manager said that when he brought up that the initiative ran contrary to the existing culture of inclusiveness, he was told to “forget that nonsense.” When he mentioned the hotline, he was told that “no one pays attention to that anymore” and if he believed that anyone at corporate was worried about what employees felt, he was “very much mistaken.”

This atmosphere, and my trepidation, continued for months, and I noticed that the production manager was being told to stay after the meeting more and more. There were times when I felt the need to defend and support him, as I knew he was being held accountable for something over which he had no control, but my boss usually cut me short.

The other strange thing was that the rest of the management team seemed extremely comfortable with this whole process and usually had ready-made excuses that shifted the blame away from themselves. I eventually reached a point where I was being blamed for the lack of progress of something that required more input from others than it did from me on a regular basis. I held meetings and private discussions with those who needed to give input and appealed to their integrity, then their team spirit, then their responsibility but nothing seemed to work – they weren’t the ones being told to stay after the meetings so they didn’t care – and they certainly didn’t care about teamwork or synergies! Things got to the point that my boss finally called me to his office to talk about this issue. I started off by trying to accept most of

the responsibility for what had happened but mentioning that it was actually a team initiative. My boss pushed me until I got to the point of telling him that it was because of the lack of effort or interest of other team members that the progress was so slow – something he already knew as he had chosen the team and assigned the responsibilities. Once I had identified the area that was hindering the process – and so the person responsible – my boss seemed happy. He told me has was glad that I had finally identified the problem and that my next course of action was to arrange to bring the person responsible up to his office. He said that until I did that then he, my boss, would hold me accountable.

CONFLICT MISMANAGEMENT 101

I didn’t feel good about what I’d been asked to do. I also couldn’t see any way that my relationship with this person would be better in the future if I went ahead and did this. I decided to talk with the production manager, as the person who was getting in the way – a production superintendent – reported into him on a daily basis. The production manager was sympathetic but unsurprised, as he told me that this individual had caused many of the problems being addressed at the morning meetings. He told me that the individual was very adept at doing what was important to my boss and what he was accountable for at the expense of everyone else’s needs.

The production manager suggested that if I wanted to have a confrontation in the boss’s office, I should make sure that I had proof of what I would say, as he was sure that the superintendent would have material to support him.

This really wasn’t what I expected when I joined the organization, and I thought that I would have one last try at getting the superintendent to see what he was causing. The meeting didn’t go well. The superintendent said he had no interest in what I had to say and that he would take care of what he needed to take care of and that I should do the same. When I pointed out that was exactly what I wanted to do and mentioned the project, he smirked and said that he wasn’t responsible for the project’s success.

I was waking early every morning and getting upset about what I was going to face at the plant. Things got worse when I saw HR going through the production manager’s desk and I was called to the meeting room. My boss explained that the production manager was not the right fit for the organization and so they had been forced to let him go. Everyone in the room knew I had supported the production manager, so all eyes turned to me when the boss suggested that if anyone else felt they didn’t fit in, then maybe they should reconsider their future with the company.

COLOR ME SURPRISED

Then something happened that I thought would make things a lot better – the leadership team received a notice from the corporate office detailing a new project that the HR department was taking on. All plants and the head office would go through a psychological analysis to identify team members’ personality and dominant behavioral traits. HR explained that we needed to be sure we had a balance of all types of personalities and that we would then learn how best to communicate and work with each other.

WWW.PLANTSERVICES.COM AUGUST 2017 43

OPERATIONAL EXCELLENCE / CHANGE MANAGEMENT

We all were sent a questionnaire to complete. About six weeks later, we received a package that explained how the analysis worked, what the results were, and what the results meant. Colors were assigned based on different personality traits; I was predominantly yellow with a touch of green. My dominant traits were of the motivator-inspirer type – the analysis indicated that I tried to get results through involvement, engagement, and motivation. It also provided an explanation of the other colors, from yellow through green, red, orange, purple, and blue. On the wheel, blue was directly opposite yellow. Blue’s style was described as directive, autocratic, and demanding.

An analyst from corporate reviewed the findings ahead of a training session scheduled for a month later on how we should approach the various colors. The day of the training arrived, and we all met with the analyst individually and then as a group. My boss seemed quite amused to learn that there was at least one motivator-inspirer in the group – he had been told generally how the group split out but not which color each person was. He felt that the makeup of the plant was fine and that once we had received the training, we’d be able to improve our performance. The analyst explained that to achieve optimum performance, the group needed balance, as each color had its strong points and weaknesses and each compensated for others.

We spent the next few hours learning how to recognize each color and the best way to communicate and work with others. It became obvious that flexibility wasn’t one of our strong points – pretty much everyone took the same communication approach no matter which color they were addressing.

The analyst then laid out a giant circle split into different color segments. Each of us was asked to guess someone else’s color and then to stand in the segment we had been guessed to reside in. That exercise suggested our staff was relatively evenly spread out.

Next, the analyst had us go to our actual colors – the HR director to red (collaborative), the continuous improvement manager to purple (part analytical, part collaborative), me to yellow – and the remaining 12 to blue. There was silence in the room as we looked around at the very lopsided circle of colors until the analyst stated the obvious: This was not the best breakout for an effective and balanced workplace.

My boss didn’t seem to be as dismayed by the overloaded blue segment as by the fact that I was standing alone in yellow – it was as if he didn’t want to believe he had hired me.

When we sat down after the color display, the analyst asked each of us how long we had worked for the organization and who had been involved in the hiring. It became apparent that most were shorter-term employees and that my boss had been involved in most of the hirings.

The analyst explained that this was a failing of the hiring process (something that most took offense to) in that HR 44

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should have ensured that the aptitude tests we had taken in the interview process were taken into consideration in the hiring. My boss broke the resulting silence by saying that if people felt like they were a good fit, then that should be enough. The analyst explained that it’s not unusual for people look for the traits they possess when interviewing, and that even though this isn’t typically a bad thing, problems could crop up if one person was involved in all of the hirings and had extra influence.

At the end of the day, I took the opportunity to have a private word with the analyst. When I asked if this type of thing was normal, she told me that she had never seen anything like this in her career and she couldn’t imagine what the atmosphere was like at the plant. When a majority of individuals fall into the blue segment, she said, the environment can become confrontational. I told her that I had been having a tough time and asked if there was anything I could do to improve the situation. She explained that the fact that most of my co-workers were diametrically opposite me meant that I would have to change my natural behavior pretty much all of the time. In her opinion, she said, I had two choices: quit or go insane. My normal motivating-inspiring approach not only would have no meaningful effect, she added, but also it would alienate my peers and make them resent me.

A CAUTIONARY LESSON

As much as I’d love to tell you that things started to improve at the plant, they didn’t – it was as if the session never took place. After about three months, I quit – I took a job I wasn’t sure that I’d like, but I had to get away from the environment before it affected my health. Shortly thereafter, I received a couple of calls from other supervisors who had reported to me, asking for a reference as they, too, had decided to leave. About two years later I received a bunch of e-mails from former co-workers telling me the plant was closing, as it had never reached the mandated performance level.

Now the lessons from this: If you take a closer look at what goes on in your department, do you know what people’s natural traits are? Do you know what motivating triggers they have, and can you communicate in the way needed to activate these triggers? You need to have a cross-section of traits, skills, and attitudes if you want a department or the plant as a whole to perform to its maximum efficiency. As you work to get everyone to the same level of involvement and empowerment, you need to recognize that there are different ways of achieving this.

Cliff Williams is author of the best-selling maintenance book “People – A Reliability Success Story.” He is a maintenance educator and has been a keynote speaker at conferences around the world. He currently enjoys sharing his knowledge and experience as maintenance and reliability adviser for People and Processes Inc. (www.peopleandprocesses.com).

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PRODUCT ROUNDUP

INSTRUMENTATION If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it RADAR LEVEL INSTRUMENT FOR TANKS & SILOS

REMOTE WEB-BASED VIBRATION DATA ANALYSIS

The Endress+Hauser 80GHz Micropilot FMR 6x free-space radar level instrument is suitable for use in tanks or silos with complex geometries, obstacles, baffles and/or nozzles.

Its small beam angle of only 3 degrees and focused FMCW 80GHz signal beam provides level measurement at distances up to 410 feet with accuracy to ±1mm. Advantages of the 80GHz signal include reduced tank wall effects, less interference from obstacles, and the ability to work with lower dielectric media.

Multiecho tracking algorithms ensure high reliability and measurement repeatability. The FMR 6x’s compact 3-inch footprint allows it to be installed in small tanks with process connections down to 3/4 inch, in tall nozzles without an antenna extension, and through ball valves. The instrument’s antenna is designed to resist sticky buildup and condensation, and false-echo suppression eases commissioning. Outputs include 4-20mA and HART.

GTI Predictive Technology introduces VibePro 8, its upgraded vibration analysis iPad app, providing route data collection, onsite analysis, and remote web-based vibration data analysis through VibePro Online. New features include: • Time waveform collection and on-screen analysis • FFT in acceleration and integrated FFT in velocity and Displacement on the iPad and in VibePro Online • Simultaneously view TWF and spectrum • High-frequency impact demodulation on the iPad and in VibePro Online • Selection of sample rate (Fmax) and number of samples (lines of resolution) • Circular time waveform plots for gearbox analysis • Waterfall plot for selected measurements • Vibration trending in acceleration/velocity for RMS, peak and crest factor values

Endress+Hauser www.endress.com

GTI Predictive Technology www.gtipredictive.com CLOUD-BASED CONDITION MONITORING

Alongside oil sampling, the AD-MTL from Checkfluid allows technicians to get real-time readings on the moisture level, temperature, and oil level of their gearbox. Sampling and checking moisture activity, temperature, and oil level are now combined into one tool at the existing drain port.

The AD-MTL’s moisture sensor extends into the active turbulent zone for the highest accuracy. Additionally, the AD-MTL comes with Checkfluid’s high-flow LT Sampling Tube, which extends into the active zone, allowing technicians to grab the most representative sample possible.

The latest addition to the Fluke Connect reliability platform, Fluke Condition Monitoring, comprises a system of rugged voltage, current, temperature, and power sensors that can be moved from asset to asset or left in place for continuous monitoring. The system consists of wireless sensors and a gateway that receives signals from the sensors from up to 30 feet away and works seamlessly with Fluke technologies such as iFlex current probes, current clamps, temperature sensors, and three-phase power monitoring. Sensors transmit measurements to the cloud as frequently as one measurement per second. Equipment data and alarm notifications are viewed through the Fluke Connect platform on a smartphone or web browser.

Checkfluid www.checkfluid.com

Fluke www.fluke.com

GEARBOX MONITOR FOR MOISTURE, TEMP, OIL LEVEL

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AUGUST 2017 WWW.PLANTSERVICES.COM

MULTILOG SYSTEM TO DETECT MACHINE FAULTS EARLY

The new SKF Multilog IMx-8 online system introduces compact technology for monitoring the condition of industrial rotating machinery, offering eight analog output channels that can be configured for a variety of sensors to ascertain acceleration, velocity, and displacement, among other parameters. The system equips users with a 24/7 monitoring solution to detect machine faults early, integrate automatic recognition to correct existing or impending conditions, and contribute to condition-based maintenance program objectives. Unlike its 16 and 32 channel variants, the IMx-8 takes up little cabinet space and is designed for installation into instrument cabinet enclosures. Suitably housed, the system also serves space-restricted applications where instruments may need to be located as closely as possible to the monitored machinery.

An app-based configuration interface allows for setup with little or no previous experience.

SKF www.skf.com CORDLESS TORQUE MULTIPLIER

The Ingersoll Rand QX Series Cordless Torque Multiplier is a high-torque fastening tool for industrial applications that achieves up to 1,475 foot-pounds of torque. Built upon the QX Series platform, this torque multiplier has a brushless motor paired with a premium Norbar gearbox to generate 160 times the torque of a standard QX Series tool. The tool is available in five combinations of torque and speed capability, ranging from 30 to 1,475 foot-pounds and 5 to 45 revolutions per minute (rpm). At the heart of the Torque Multiplier is the Ingersoll Rand closed-loop transducer, which is the key to delivering torque precision, unmatched accuracy and traceable results. The tool also can store records for as many as 1,200 fastenings, which can be downloaded to a computer via a USB cable or wirelessly transferred to a dedicated process communication module (PCM).

Ingersoll Rand www.ingersollrand.com PX119 SERIES PRESSURE TRANSDUCERS

Omega introduces a new series of low-cost, compact pressure transducers with an all-stainless-steel body and rugged construction. The PX119 Series is designed to provide

reliable pressure measurement for material handling, industrial, and mobile equipment applications where cost and space constraints requiring a small body are important. A high reliability piezoresistive ceramic sensor with a custom ASIC signal conditioner provides an excellent thermally compensated output. The transducer measures pressure ranges from 15 to 5000 psig; it is CE-certified.

Omega Engineering www.omega.com WIDE AREA SENSORS WITH IP67 INGRESS PROTECTION

AutomationDirect has expanded its sensors offering to include wide area sensors for object detection. The new area sensors from Micro Detectors (MD) are multibeam, throughbeam sensors with emitter and receiver elements used for detecting the presence of any object by sensing the light beam intensity returning from the receiver. The area sensors have an IEC IP67 ingress protection rating, and are available in basic and advanced versions. CX0 Series basic area sensors have a sensing distance of up to 6m and a detection height up to 320mm. CX2 Series advanced area sensors also have a sensing distance of up to 6m with detection height of up to 960mm and offer analog outputs and a blanking function.

AutomationDirect www.automationdirect.com SITRANS FX330 VORTEX FLOWMETER

The Siemens digitally based Sitrans FX330 Vortex flowmeter combines flow, pressure, and temperature monitoring into a single two-wire device. This allows for detection over a wide range of process values, including volume flow, mass flow, standard volume flow, density, temperature, pressure, and heat energy.

Features include: • Integrated reduction of nominal diameter permits a large turndown ratio, reducing installation cost • Gross and net heat calculation supports advanced energy management • Meets IEC 61508 SIL 2 safety standards.

Siemens www.usa.siemens.com WWW.PLANTSERVICES.COM AUGUST 2017 47

CLASSIFIEDS PRODUCTS AND SERVICES

YOUR SAFETY PROGRAM STARTS HERE

HAND HELD VIBRATION FFT

Occupational Safety and Health provides an overview of potential workplace hazards, necessary safety practices, and how various processes need to be managed in order to maintain a safe workplace. This reference is designed for use in introductory safety courses and by professionals who want to advance in the field as well as individuals who need to understand and implement safety programs.

708-957-1100 x304 • www.atplearning.com American Technical Publishers

VibChecker is a light and compact-sized instrument for vibration measurement in the 10-1000 Hz frequency range. Measurement results are immediately and automatically evaluated against ISO standards. Green - yellow - red LEDs indicate vibration severity and a real time FFT spectrum is produced for easy pattern recognition. Results can be stored for documentation and follow-up. VibChecker is an all set to go instrument; just point the probe and measure to locate vibration-related problems.

800-505-5636 • www.spminstrument.com SPM Instrument

COOL ELECTRONIC CABINETS

YOUR DIAMOND DECADE STARTS TODAY

TUL Listed and CE compliant Cabinet Cooler® Systems are the low cost way to cool and purge heat sensitive electronics. Cabinet Coolers produce cold air at 20ºF from compressed air. NEMA 4, 4X (stainless steel), and 12 models are available with thermostat control to minimize compressed air usage. No moving parts.

800-903-9247 • www.exair.com/85/140.htm EXAIR Corporation

As an industry leader in rotary screw design, Sullair offers the market’s most comprehensive warranty on new compressors. The exclusive Diamond Warranty provides – 10 years air end protection, 5 years coverage on key components – main motor, aftercooler, oil cooler, separator vessel and variable speed drive (if equipped). Contact your local Sullair distributor for more information.

218-879-5451 or 1-800-Sullair http://www.sullairinfo.com/diamond/ Sullair

OPTIMIZE CLEANING POWER

PUMP LUBRICANT

“NLB Corporations Torrent™ tank cleaning heads optimize horsepower and flow for powerful cleaning action. We offer a complete selection of 3-D heads, telescopic lances, swivel turrets, protective cages and extensions for practically any application. Provides complete 360 degree interior coverage of your tank or reactor.” www.nlbcorp.com/products/accessories/tank-cleaning/ or call (800) 227-7652.

NLB Corp.

Summit CentriPump PPO series offers superior rust and corrosion properties, oxidation life and anti-wear protection. It is a synthetic and petroleum blend designed for centrifugal compressors. Summit CentriPump SPO series is a PAO base stock with advanced additive technology. These pump lubricants offer specific solutions for your pump application as well as a number of benefits including longer oil drain intervals and extreme temperature performance.

800-749-5823 • www.klsummit.com/products/lubricants/pumps-oil Summit

SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION (800) 553-8878 PUTMAN MEDIA, INC. 1501 E. Woodfield Rd. Suite 400N Schaumburg, IL 60173 Phone: (630) 467-1300 REPRINTS JILL KALETHA Reprints Marketing Manager, Foster Reprints (866) 879-9144 ext.194 jillk@fosterprinting.com

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AUGUST 2017 WWW.PLANTSERVICES.COM

MIKE BRENNER, GROUP PUBLISHER AR, AZ, Northern CA, CO, ID, IL, MN, MT, NE, NV, NM, ND, OK, OR, SD, UT, WA, WI, WY Phone: (630) 467-1300, ext. 487 Fax: (630) 467-1120 e-mail: mbrenner@putman.net BETH ROLFE, REGIONAL SALES MANAGER AL, Southern CA, CT, DE, FL, GA, LA, ME, MD, MA, MS, NH, NJ, NY, NC, PA, RI, SC, TX, VT, VA, DC, WV Phone: (630) 467-1300, ext.440 Fax: (630) 467-1120 e-mail: Brolfe@putman.net

MICHAEL CONNAUGHTON, ACCOUNT EXECUTIVE IA, IN, KS, KY, MI, MO, OH, TN, Canada, Literature Reviews, Inside Print and Digital Sales Phone: (513) 543-6432 Fax: (630) 467-1120 e-mail: mconnaughton@putman.net POLLY DICKSON, INSIDE SALES MANAGER Classifieds Phone: (630) 467-1300, ext.396 Fax: (630) 467-1120 e-mail: pdickson@putman.net

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BIG PICTURE INTERVIEW

NFPA 70E 2018: WHAT’S COMING Hierarchy of risk controls gets higher emphasis in the drive to protect workers Tim Rohrer is president, CEO, and founder of Exiscan (www.exiscan.com), a Rochester, NY-based provider of infrared windows and other industrial electrical safety products. At UE Systems’ Reliable Asset World conference in May, he previewed the 2018 revision of NFPA 70E, the Standard for Electrical Safety in the Workplace. One of the biggest changes for 2018, Rohrer says, is the heightened focus on following the six-level hierarchy of risk controls to protect workers from electrical hazards.

Rohrer spoke recently with Plant Services about what this means for employers – and workers.

PS The hierarchy of risk controls – (1) hazard elimination, (2) substitution, (3) engineering controls, (4) warnings, (5) administrative controls/training, and (6) personal protective equipment (PPE) – isn’t new. So how does NFPA 70E 2018 call greater attention to it, and what’s the reason for doing so?

TR In the 2015 revision, they moved the references to the hierarchy of risk controls from the appendix into an informational note in the body of the text, but the appendix and informational notes are referred to as optional language. It’s not part of the mandatory language of the text. In this revision cycle, there is a greater emphasis on risk assessment, and there’s better clarification on how to perform a risk assessment.

The upcoming revision, expected to be released in September, will move the hierarchy to mandatory language by clarifying the risk assessment process. After identifying a hazard, you will assess the likelihood that a person would be exposed to the hazard – for example, an arc flash event. If a likelihood exists, the hazard must be mitigated using the hierarchy of risk controls. You’ll seek to mitigate risk by the most effective method available, preferably by eliminating the hazard. If elimination is not an option, then substitution is the second-most-effective method, then engineering controls, and on down the line to PPE. That’s not to say PPE isn’t important; it’s critically important if you can’t mitigate otherwise. Using this hierarchy protects personnel by controlling risks in the most effective manner available.

Hazard elimination has always been the prime directive.

I tell people, NFPA 70E is really a very simple document; if you want to boil it down to one sentence, it’s, “Turn it off before you go in.” De-energizing has always been the #1 thing you’re supposed to do. Unfortunately, when people would pick through the document, they often saw the old table section and mistakenly interpreted it as “identify the hazard, and grab your PPE if you want to work energized.”

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PS What’s your sense of the early response to this revision?

TR It really depends on the facility. Progressive facilities that place a higher emphasis on worker safety, they have a “we don’t do that here” kind of a philosophy. “We just don’t open energized gear on site, end of story.” Others will try to jump through the loophole of infeasibility. The infeasibility clause basically allows for energized work if it’s not feasible to do your task in another way, and it gives the example of doing diagnostics such as thermography. But what a lot of facilities will try to stretch that into is, “Well, it’s not feasible to shut down because we’re trying to get all the product out the door that we can this week.” That’s not infeasible; that’s inconvenient. And those are two entirely different things.

PS What should EH&S and maintenance teams do to prepare for the changes in NFPA 70E 2018?

TR Take a look at the work processes (you) have in place for various tasks, especially routine tasks, and just start to pick through it and say, OK, how could we do this with a higher order of risk control rather than jumping right straight to PPE? If I were a pit-crew boss for a racecar, I would never say to my driver, “Hey, we’ve got a lot of looseness on the right front tire, and we’ve got some funkiness going on over here, but don’t worry – you’ve got your magic suit and helmet on, so you’ll be safe.” You’d never say that. You’d first try to tighten that car up so that it was as safe as possible. It’s a similar analogy to how people should be approaching electrical preventive maintenance.

Similarly, I’d never go to my driver and say, “Hey, this car is probably the safest thing we’ve ever put on the track; you can leave the magic suit and helmet in your locker.” If the worst-case scenario ever happened, you would want them to be wearing their PPE. If you’re not able to eliminate the hazard or substitute it down to an acceptable level, you’ll be using PPE as part of a suite of control measures.

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CSuccess ustomer Story

COMPRESSORS

Keep It Under Control!

Kaeser puts automotive supplier in the driver’s seat of compressed air efficiency PROBLEM:

A Tier 1 automotive seating and electrical supplier was interested in taking advantage of local utility rebate incentives. For their compressed air needs, they had been relying on four compressors manufactured in the 1980’s, inherited from a sister plant. Each unit operated in modulation control and was manually switched on and off, leaving the units continually fighting each other, resulting in wasted energy, fluctuating pressure, and increased maintenance costs.

SOLUTION:

Kaeser performed a complete Air Demand Analysis (ADA) to identify the plant’s current compressed air needs and to develop a plan for implementing the most energy efficient solution possible. Additionally, Kaeser recommended a Sigma Air Manager (SAM) master controller to properly control the system and ensure the most energy efficient combination of units would be selected to meet current plant demand.

RESULT: Thanks to better controls and adding an energy efficient variable frequency drive compressor, the customer was able to reduce their annual maximum power consumption by 865,440 kWh—the equivalent of removing 100 homes from the power grid for one year—all without compromising stable system pressure. With the older compressors relegated to back-up, annual maintenance costs have been reduced from $37,000 to $18,000. Less maintenance also means less downtime, for increased productivity.

Specific Power of Previous System: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .28.93 kW/100 cfm Specific Power of New System: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .17.66 kW/100 cfm Annual Energy Cost of Previous System: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $252,988 Annual Energy Cost Savings: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $114,720 Additional Savings in Maintenance Costs: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $19,000 TOTAL ANNUAL SAVINGS:. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $133,720 Utility Rebate: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $71,579 TOTAL SAVINGS: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . $205,299

Let us help you measure and manage your compressed air costs!

Kaeser Compressors, Inc. • 866-516-6888 • us.kaeser.com/PS Built for a lifetime is a trademark of Kaeser Compressors, Inc.

©2017 Kaeser Compressors, Inc.

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