LENGTH OF TIME: 5 Days

CLASS SIZE: 8 people

LOCATION: Roanoke, VA

COST: $3,790 per person

Game Plan

• HMI/SCADA. You will start off working on your Monday/Tuesday program again. Remember it? Your first project will be a HMI and SCADA upgrade. For the HMI, you will use a Panelview 800. For the SCADA, you will use Inductive Automation’s Ignition software. Many of you will be using Factorytalk View when you get back to work. Just like the first class, we work on developing principles that are transferable from platform to platform.

• Reduce Unplanned Downtime. Then you’ll be back on the Unfamiliar Machine. You’ll troubleshoot simululated breakdowns again for a good review of Part 1. But that is only the beginning. Then we will discuss how you could have programmed PLC logic to identify the fault.

• Project Planning. You have to be self motivated to do Part 2. This is meant to prepare you for continuing your improvements after you leave. You must be able to set goals, work towards them, and report on your progress.

Goals for the Week

• Reduce Reactive Maintenance. Reactive maintenance is the downtime you learned to identify in Part 1. Downtime varies between manufacturers, but small business manufacturing downtime cost between $150-450 per minute and large manufacturers downtime cost can be over $20,000 per minute. That means if a machine was down for the amount of time you have been reading this page, you would have likely spent enough to pay for this course.

• Schedule Preventative Maintenance Better. If you learn that after every 100 hours of pump runtime, the strainer clogs causing a low flow alarm, you can program the machine to give a warning after 80 hours of runtime that the strainer needs to be cleaned.

• Anticipate Problems with Predictive Maintenance. One key promise of advanced sensor technologies is the ability to trend machine performance and discover subtle differences in machine performance that may indicate a problem in the future. For example with a standard proximity sensor, it either works or doesn’t. But with an IO Link sensor, not only can we see an ON/OFF indication, we can see the sensor intensity. If we know the intensity is normally 70% and it only shows 65%, you can program the machine to warn that the sensor needs cleaned and checked.

• Transition to Total Productive Maintenance. If your plant is like most, the maintenance team is solely responsible for keeping the plant running yet they rarely are at the machine until there is a problem. With proper data, management can better identify and understand costly downtimes to justify capital improvement projects. Operators are there 100% of the time. With the proper tools enabling them to take ownership of their machines, they can do better preventative maintenance and identify items that are wearing out.

• Continuous Improvement and Maintenance Strategies. If you could only state one goal for the class, it would be to stop fixing the same problem over and over. Each time a machine breaks, not only should you note what happened to reduce the time to fix next time, but you should evaluate what programming improvements could have helped and if there was no way to detect the problem, what control components could be modified or added.