Tom's Takes

In my previous take I spoke about a plant’s instrumentation assets being able to support Smart Manufacturing. I focused on failure maintenance, and for the sake of argument for this post, let’s assume failure maintenance isn’t an issue, when problems occur, they are repaired timely and properly. So, what is the logical next step in the journey? I believe it is to implement a good preventative maintenance (PM) plan for each type of instrument and final control element (pressure, temperature, control valves, etc.) that considers the criticality of the asset. This can be a daunting task due to the complexity in types of instrumentation and different manufacturers involved that I mentioned in the last post. A good example is level measurement, the PM plan can’t be the same for all types of level instruments, the PM needs to match the measurement technology. For instance, you would not have the same PM plan for differential pressure (DP) level transmitter and radar level transmitter. If you would like to take your instrumentation reliability to the next level and need some assistance developing a program, please reach out, we can help you navigate the complexity of instrumentation preventative maintenance.