Automatic equipment downtime monitoring in the cement industry

In order to stay competitive in today's business world it is extremely important to make effective fact-based decisions. This, along with the philosophy of "if you can't measure it, you can't control it", helped Holcim's Devil's Slide Plant to recognize a need to more accurately track and account for downtime or lost equipment opportunities. It became apparent, when using the "old school" method of outage tracking such as a shift log or other similar manual measurements, that many of the small outages were getting overlooked. These small outages, although short in duration, are sometimes quite high in frequency and not only impact equipment downtime, but quality as well. With the system for Automatic Downtime Monitoring (ADM), Devil's Slide Plant personnel have found a very effective way of automatically capturing the start and stop times of outages, including allowing for reasons and comments to be associated with every occurrence. Using this database of information, pareto charts summarizing the duration and frequency of outages are automatically generated. A pareto chart graphically summarizes and displays the relative importance of different groups of data. These charts help identify areas of opportunity in equipment availability, possible equipment problems, and allow for both maintenance and production departments to make informed decisions in a timely and effective manner. The simplicity and effectiveness of this application has shown such encouraging results, that as plant personnel, we are finding new ways of utilizing its potential to automatically capture and track other events in areas such as rate loss, environmental, and control. With the automated technology available through this application, measuring and accuracy are no longer issues in making fact-based decisions.