Look and Listen: Your Plant is Telling You How to Optimize for Efficiency
Plant efficiency is coming to the fore in maintaining and improving many legacy and recently developed pellet mills in the United States. As we supply the world with compressed wood fuel, producers continue to look to efficiency and optimization to increase profit and production from mature plants. Evergreen has partnered with many leading wood pellet developers, production facilities and equipment manufacturers over the years, developing a legacy of quality designed processes and plants. Part and parcel to this track record of production efficacy is a focus on the ability to identify areas of greatest impact for optimization.
The Vital Few
If process efficiency is the main goal, why would a maintenance or reliability department measure hundreds of different elements? We’ve often steered plant staff to monitor and track a select few indicators that reflect their vision and goals. Evergreen has employed and worked with university and industry PhD types, and even employed these scientists. One particular project manager invoked the Pareto Principle as a useful rule in this way: Select the 20% of all possible indicators that help explain 80% or more of your impacted data. In this way, you will reveal your top issues to address. So often, paralysis by analysis is found in a sea of data that soon obscures, instead of indicates, to address. Avoid obfuscation by focusing on the highest-value data.
Attend
Your plant’s most critical physical areas and sensors required to measure key performance indicators (KPIs) will best be indicated by the people who use them daily. We recommend working closely with production and automation teams to determine the proper setup of live production monitoring. Data collection in the form of information from sensors is key for understanding problematic areas, issues with equipment and current capacities. In turn, this historic data is used for measuring and tracking increased capabilities and status after repairs and modifications. Clearly, first determining and implementing the proper sensors and data collectors in appropriate areas ensures your data is indicating the actual status of process equipment.
Invest
Technology moves at the speed of light. Ensure your team is equipped with the tools to do the job well. Some legacy organizations still firmly believe that portable devices such as tablets and laptops are not needed for routine tasks performed by the maintenance team; perhaps there is concern of loss, as anything not nailed down tends to make its way offsite. This mindset turns out to be very short-sighted. Certainly, hardware items such as tablets might get misplaced; they’ll suffer abuse and damage and will need replacement, but they’re undoubtedly a key element in helping maintenance teams accomplish daily routines. Today’s rugged outdoor-use tablets can take a beating, but the decision boils down to this question: How much will an hour, or even a minute, of downtime cost your mill? Can your maintenance supervisor look up the replacement part on the spot, check it out of the storeroom in advance and know exactly where the part is located? Or do they need to log in to a PC in the storeroom, look around for the part and manually sign it out, increasing the repair time by two to five times the original estimate? In most cases, the cost of one of these portable devices can be easily regained with one single downtime event.
Document
Take the time to write down every action. Take photos of the equipment being repaired, compile detailed notes, and even (use Evergreen for) drawings and exploded diagrams that can be pulled up on the spot. Your new tablets can provide valuable information that was not readily accessible before. The future is now—at trade shows and on-site demonstrations, you’ve likely been exposed to augmented reality. This technology will be a key feature in the near future for training new team members and diagnosing and troubleshooting issues. Soon, technicians will be able to “see” the exact location for a compounding issue, determine the best strategies for fixing it, and bring up detailed instructions and even safety warnings mounted on live camera images, all helping minimize downtime.
Not sure where to start? Your production team has real-world experience to tell you, if you’ll listen. Enlisting outside expertise and a second set of eyes will lend valuable insight as well as a clear path forward, including leveraging the greater pellet ecosystem, as we’ve designed and implemented in many systems and seen work.
At least you’re reading the right magazine!
Author: Evergreen Engineering
www.evergreenengineering.com
info@evergreenengineering.com