UPGRADING TECHNOLOGY FOR BETTER SITE-WIDE CONDITION MONITORING At last, plant-wide condition monitoring is no longer a pipe dream GE Bently Nevada’s System 1 Evolution® is now merged with Commtest Ascent® and has functionality to provide your trending, alarming, early warning fault diagnosis and reporting for asset health. nvms.co.nz www.engineeringnews.co.nz 25 Contact: +61 8 9380 6933 sales@nvms.co.nz With a small team to keep equipment running, maintenance and outage supervisor Tim Harrison wanted to increase their ability to detect faults early and give all stakeholders access to the data to improve reliability. Mr Harrison wanted to upgrade on-site equipment and allow the team to do some of its own analysis, but the significant cost of upgrading was an objection from management. A clear path to better condition monitoring NVMS devised an upgrade path that would arrive at the team’s preferred solution: GE’s System 1, a system bringing process and monitoring data into one platform for analysis. Mr Harrison says that NVMS had been very helpful in helping him justify the upgrade path to management. “The guys from NVMS have been very proactive and very patient with us – they gave us all the information and then let us make a decision. It has been first class,” Mr Harrison says. “Some people would say they are just salesmen trying to sell us a product, but they seem to have a genuine understanding. The first part was to understand exactly what we wanted and to see where we wanted to get to in three to four years’ time. They set up a pathway, which made it easy for me then to pass the right information and get the decisions made by our management team.” Benefits of a better system includes Improved on-site data collection capability has given NewGen the ability to cut costs on external contractors. “My plan this coming year is to only use a third party contractor to analyse the data: we will collect the data ourselves. At the moment I’m paying two days a month, but we will see a 50% saving because we won’t be paying some-one to come to site.” The new equipment also gives the maintenance and operations teams visibility of machine condition, which will help them avoid downtime. “If we have more up to date and accurate information we will save money because we can avoid malfunctions and trips.” Customer care with NVMS Mr Harrison says customer service from NVMS has been first class. Not only did NVMS come to site to help during the sales process, but they helped with product selection, justification and followed up with installation. NVMS also trained the team how to use the new equipment. “They didn’t just give it to us and say ‘here it is’. They actually made sure it worked and was fit for purpose for us, which is really good.” With five-year support and warranty supplied with all the GE’s Bently Nevada product line, Tim Harrison is assured that NVMS will be able to support his team’s condition monitoring program now and into the future. NewGen Power Kwinana’s maintenance team were relying on protection systems to safeguard their assets, collecting vibration data via an outside contractor once a month. Without monitoring equipment to collect and analyse data themselves, the team didn’t have visibility of early fault signals to help them avoid trips and failures.
EN-Nov16
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