As we start the month of May and enjoy sunnier days ahead, we’d like to shine a light on the value that advanced pattern recognition software (APR) brings to operations. As an effective tool for predictive maintenance, APR benefits industries. It does this by helping them optimize productivity, reduce costs, and prevent catastrophic equipment failures. In other words, imagine having the insight to identify potential issues days, weeks, or even months before they occur – that’s the benefit APR brings.
What is Advanced Pattern Recognition?
APR is a technique in cognitive science and artificial intelligence that enables computers to recognize and predict patterns in data. APR and predictive analytics are crucial for identifying potential equipment failures in the process plant industry. By identifying patterns at a granular level, organizations can detect deviations from normal that go unnoticed by the human eye. As the demand for large-scale cost reduction grows, advanced pattern recognition software has become a key strategy for improving plant maintenance.
The Phases of APR
APR involves five essential phases: data collection, feature selection, model selection, learning, and cognitive assessment. These phases ensure the gathering of high-quality data. it does this by identifying valuable characteristics, selecting and training an appropriate model, and validating the model’s effectiveness and reliability.
Understanding the process and value of APR is crucial for organizations looking to create a pattern recognition program for their plants. By leveraging the power of advanced pattern recognition software, companies can significantly improve their maintenance strategies. It helps to reduce costs and minimize the impact of random equipment failures.
The Value of APR: Benefits from Predictive Maintenance
APR delivers many benefits that help organizations improve their operations and stay ahead. By leveraging the power of predictive analytics, APR hbenefits companies by helping them save time, money, and energy.
Save Time
Reduce Unplanned Machine Downtime
Unplanned equipment downtime can be a significant challenge, as 89% of industrial equipment failures are random and not age-related. These random failures are difficult to predict using traditional methods, such as visual inspections or time-based maintenance.
APR benefits software by addressing this challenge by analyzing equipment data to identify subtle patterns. It finds anomalies that indicate potential issues, even if the equipment appears to be functioning normally. By detecting these hidden signs of deterioration, APR enables organizations to take proactive measures. Furthermore, It helps to prevent unexpected breakdowns, reducing unplanned downtime.
Digitally Transform Scheduling
Effective maintenance scheduling relies on accurate information about your equipment’s current condition. APR solutions provide this critical insight, enabling a predictive approach to maintenance planning. APR identifies potential issues weeks or months in advance. In addition, it gives your team the lead time to plan and execute maintenance tasks efficiently, reducing the stress and chaos of last-minute repairs.
APR benefits your team helping them make data-informed decisions when scheduling maintenance activities. With a clear understanding of each asset’s condition and importance, you can prioritize maintenance on critical equipment. Moreover, you have the power to delay non-essential tasks or place assets on a watch list for further monitoring. This flexibility allows you to create maintenance schedules based on asset importance, asset redundancy, compliance requirements, and current production demands.
Prepare for Scheduled Downtime
Scheduled downtime presents a valuable opportunity to perform planned maintenance on equipment and address a wide range of potential issues that may be difficult to tackle during regular operation. With APR benefits at your fingertips, you can identify and prioritize maintenance tasks, ranging from replacing failed sensors to addressing precursor failures that could lead to more significant problems down the line.
In addition, during scheduled downtime, it’s essential to leverage the expertise of your internal team members, OEMs, or external consultants. These experts can provide valuable insights and help you maximize the available time to optimize your equipment’s performance and reliability. By combining APR’s capabilities with the knowledge of your expert resources, you can develop a comprehensive strategy that addresses both immediate needs and long-term improvements, ultimately reducing future downtime and enhancing your organization’s overall efficiency.
Save Money
Reduce Unnecessary Maintenance Costs
APR software helps optimize your maintenance strategy by providing insights into which equipment needs attention and when, eliminating the need for costly, blanket maintenance policies. By focusing resources on the assets that require the most attention, you can reduce overall maintenance costs by 8-12%, as the Department of Energy reported.
APR enables you to strike the right balance between different maintenance types (e.g., corrective, preventative, and predictive maintenance). A data-informed approach allows you to continuously evaluate and adjust your maintenance strategy, ensuring that you’re effectively reducing costs without compromising safety, production, or quality.
Prioritize High-Impact Maintenance
Your subject matter experts (SMEs) are some of your organization’s most valuable assets, and their time should be spent where it can have the most significant impact. APR solutions help your SMEs work faster, smarter, and more efficiently by identifying high-priority, high-cost areas requiring expertise. By pinpointing critical issues, APR tools enable your experts to focus on solving problems and implementing solutions rather than wasting time sifting through complex data or searching for potential failures.
APR solutions provide clear, actionable insights that empower your SMEs to make informed decisions quickly. With the ability to identify unfamiliar patterns and potential failures, your experts can proactively address issues before they escalate, minimizing downtime and maximizing operational efficiency. By leveraging APR tools to support your SMEs, you can harness the full potential of your organization’s expertise and drive continuous improvement.
Minimize Premature Replacements
A rip-and-replace mentality can lead to premature asset replacements and excessive inventory costs. APR solutions help you break free from this costly cycle by providing the insights needed to maximize asset lifecycles and improve your maintenance strategy.
By accurately predicting when equipment will likely fail, APR tools enable you to plan parts orders and maintenance schedules effectively. This proactive approach allows you to extend the life of your assets, reducing the need for premature replacements and minimizing the costs associated with maintaining a large inventory of spare parts.
Save Energy
Preserve Organization Knowledge
Knowledge is power. By leveraging the insights generated by APR, you can ensure that valuable expertise is preserved and accessible to all team members, even as experienced personnel retire or move on.
APR insights also provide a common ground for collaboration and knowledge sharing across your organization. By working from a shared set of accurate, data-informed insights, team members from different departments and experience levels can discuss challenges, brainstorm solutions, and drive continuous improvement.
Focus on What’s Important
By reducing the burden of unplanned maintenance and unexpected equipment failures, APR software frees up your team to focus on their core responsibilities. This increased flexibility can improve job satisfaction, higher productivity, and a more positive work environment overall.
With APR solutions handling the complex task of identifying equipment issues, your team can dedicate their time and energy to high-value activities that drive innovation, optimize processes, and improve customer satisfaction. By focusing on what matters most, your organization can achieve its goals more efficiently and effectively while fostering a culture of excellence and continuous improvement.
Identify Improvement Areas
When combined with a data historian, APR software provides a comprehensive view of your operations, enabling you to identify areas for improvement. While a data historian gives you valuable insights into past and current operations, APR tools help you see the future. By combining the two solutions, you can drive continuous improvement.
With APR and data historian tools working together, you can uncover hidden trends, inefficiencies, and growth opportunities. This holistic approach to operational analysis empowers you to proactively address potential issues, reduce waste, and improve overall performance.
How We Help You Shine
We are proud to offer customer-centric solutions to every organization we partner with. Our advanced pattern recognition solution, HanPHI, brings APR benefits to our customers to help plants keep their equipment healthy and productive.
Advance Operations with APR Benefits
Stay Ahead of Equipment Failures
HanPHI sends you early warnings about equipment health degradations, giving you the information you need to act before potential issues escalate. These proactive notifications help improve plant safety and reliability without requiring you to constantly log into systems to view data.
Gain Actionable Insights at a Glance
Our intuitive software provides a clear overview of your facility’s health, enabling you to identify which assets are experiencing health issues quickly. HanPHI’s user-friendly interface allows you to access the insights you need to avoid impending failures easily.
Embrace Predictive Maintenance
HanPHI helps expand your maintenance strategy to include predictive maintenance, allowing you to optimize your maintenance activities and reduce unnecessary costs. By focusing on the right assets at the right time, you can free up your team to concentrate on their core responsibilities.
Improve Productivity with APR Benefits
Minimize the Impact of Downtime
Unexpected asset failures cause delays in production and productivity. A loss in either is always a setback. Our early warnings let your team plan ahead and avoid losing more.
Proactively Address Potential Issues
Don’t wait until assets experience unplanned downtime when you can prepare for maintenance in advance. Moreover, with HanPHI, organizations learn from past anomalies to be more confident in handling potential failures in the future.
Keep Everyone on The Same Page
HanPHI serves as a centralized platform for sharing information and insights across teams. Additionally, with features like early warning comments, HanPHI makes it easier to keep everyone on the same page and work together to address potential failures.
Drill Down to the Problem Faster with APR Benefits
SuccessTree Root-Cause Analysis
Don’t waste time searching through equipment data to investigate the cause of a potential asset failure. In other words, with our SuccessTree, a hierarchical representation of the plant down to the sensor level, you can immediately see which piece of equipment is affecting the entire facility’s asset health status.
Easy to Understand Index
The plant health index provides an intuitive overview of the status from 0-100%. Moreover, all layers of the organization can quickly and easily understand the current operating status of the site and equipment at a glance.
Drill Down to Problems Immediately
HanPHI lets you determine the cause of equipment failures before they happen. In summary, leave your equipment problems to us and take advantage of APR benefits.
Contact one of our solution experts to take advantage of the powerful insights advanced pattern recognition software can provide for your operations.