Plant asset management for the oil and gas industry
The structural change process currently taking place in the energy supply sector has forced owners and operators of gas-based plant to increasingly take servicing into account: This is because legislature guidelines and own liability responsibilities mean that every gas supply company is required to maintain its plant in technically faultless safe condition and to perform monitoring and servicing at predefined time intervals.
The new energy economics laws also assign great importance to reliability, availability and integrity factors for each individual element of the infrastructure. To provide proof of operational reliability in the technical safety sense, complex gas plants in particular must be checked and maintained regularly. Cost optimisation and planning reliability also play a major role here. In addition to the checks necessary to carry this out, more and more use is today being made of powerful IT tools for status recording and data archiving. Servicing activities particularly require the recording, processing and provision of a large amount of process-relevant data.
Against the background of the NAMUR NE 91 recommendation "System Requirements for Plant-Related Asset Management", PC-Soft GmbH has, with zedas®asset, developed an IT tool for servicing that maintains and increases value. This concentrates on linking technical and commercial aspects of servicing, focussing on the following points: - Minimisation of unplanned downtimes and failures
- Unified processes and improved workflows
- Less effort for servicing planning and evaluation
- Homogeneous documentation of servicing measures and corresponding proof
- Observance of all technical rules and regulations (particularly DVGW G 495)
- Cost transparency with regard to technical objects, structural units and measures
- Data collection (weak point analyses, ID systems, fault possibility and effect analyses, FMEA)
- Support for Controlling through Key Performance Indicators and Balanced Scorecard
Modules & Functions
With the help of the servicing planning system and plant diagnosis, plant measured values relevant to servicing are filtered out during plant analysis, faults are diagnosed causes analysed and the results shown in clearly laid out evaluations. Special questions are also answered, such as: - Where do I start to troubleshoot?
- How often has the part failed, and in this fitting position in particular?
- What load has it been subjected to, and was this also the load for earlier failures?
- When was the last maintenance and have the intervals been kept to?
- What is the guarantee status of the plant or of the plant components?
Interfaces to existing ERP systems can be flexibly set up; they add automatic inspection and status- and risk-based servicing to the existing solution.
Servicing as an added-value factor
Servicing is part of the company's added-value chain and creates measurable value in terms of provision of replacement provision and availability. Servicing concepts and strategies that fit the production process and are status-oriented and predictive are needed more than ever today. Particularly since "the costs for servicing that is not carried out or is carried out in unsatisfactory fashion is 3 to 5 times higher than direct servicing costs are estimated to be". (Source: H. Neuhaus at the 12th University of Dortmund Servicing Forum, 16 - 17.03.2007)
zedas®asset efficiently supports this process with a central database, powerful functions to structure and use customer- and application-specific knowledge bases and a homogeneous and easy-to-use user interface. Results obtained by customers show that intensive scrutiny of the servicing process can bring potential savings of between 5 and 30% depending on the type of plant. | 
