Integrated Device Diagnostics

The other day a customer asked me how other plants incorporate intelligent device management and predictive diagnostics in daily work practices. And how technicians can make sense of the plethora of diagnostics available in intelligent devices. How do they know what to do when a particular device alerts appears?

A key enabler is to display critical device diagnostics to the operators on the operator consoles. When device diagnostics is only shown on dedicated maintenance consoles, it tends to not be acted upon because nobody sits at the maintenance console so the device alarm is not seen straight away. However, operators are always at their console and when a critical device alert is displayed to them they got minutes or hours to act before their process is affected. After that they can call on the technician to fix the device. In order to not swamp operators with device alerts, only the most critical device problems affecting the process are routed to the operators. This filtering can be done using PlantWeb Alerts according to NAMUR NE 107 requirements configured to EEMUA 191 recommendations. EDDL is the technology that enables display diagnostics in the operator consoles without interfering with system robustness. The manufacturer’s expert share their know-how by providing help text and illustrative images to interpret diagnostics and guide technicians to possible corrective action. See demonstration in this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6vVO3sYueUw

What are your thoughts? Are you struggling to make predictive diagnostics a natural part of maintenance?