Tom's Takes

There has been a lot of buzz in recent years with Smart Manufacturing, Industry 4.0 and so forth. The question I pose is “are your underlying ISA-95 Level 0 assets able to support Smart Manufacturing?” In a lot of plants that I have been in over the years, instruments and valves are always run to failure, will little to no predictive or preventative maintenance ever performed. Ask yourself “in a run to failure scenario, can my maintenance team and storeroom support these failures?” A lot of times the answer to that is question is “no”. So, what is the difficulty in having a replacement on hand to be able to replace or repair the failed device? The answer to this is several fold. First, most plants have little to no standards for instrumentation which promotes much manufacture variation out in the field. Secondly unlike larger assets, there is much model number complexity, and multiple different process connections that make it even harder (if you don’t believe me, go on a manufacturer’s website and run their product configuration tool after you figure out what base model number you want..). Lastly, sometimes it is difficult for the maintenance team to determine what the actual replacement needs to be if it is an obsolete model or maybe the maintenance team doesn’t have that skilled instrument technician needed to perform the work. Often, these factors result in the instrument or valve not being repaired at all, operators just find work-arounds. If this sounds familiar, please reach out, we have the skills and resources to help with getting your Level 0 assets in a better place.