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India's decisive push to catapult into Industry 4.0 is a testimony to the growing acknowledgment of adopting Internet of Things (IoT), and Artificial Intelligence (AI) enabled solutions and devices. With the rise of global competition and demand, increasingly complex and highly challenging operations that are propelling the cost along with quality, dependability and sustainability have emerged as primary concerns for businesses.
With the optimization of resources and consistency arising as the key influencers, the leap to Internet of Things (IoT) enabled Digital Transformation has widened the possibilities for innovations. Machines are progressively becoming equipped with the ability to communicate vital data critical for efficient and effective operations.
This transformation brings an era of Internet of Things (IoT), i.e., the network of interconnected devices that share information to drive insights. Such interaction offers a plethora of invaluable data that help in making informed decisions aimed at sustainable growth of businesses and society. Presently, there are about 20 billion Internet-connected devices globally that are expected to exceed 50 billion by 2050.(1)
Hitachi has been at the forefront of innovation that delivers value-based outcomes through IoT enabled solutions envisioned to connect devices, people, infrastructure, and processes.
Asset Monitoring
Asset monitoring, also known as asset tracking and a key feature of asset management entails a system of hardware and software that logs information about tangible assets, allowing a business to verify its assets' location and status.
An asset monitoring system also tracks an asset's name, type, usage, engine hours, maintenance schedule, or other information, and send alerts to pre-defined stakeholders (managers and maintenance staff), before anything goes amiss.
Asset Monitoring and Maintenance Optimization system adopts a responsive, IoT-enhanced approach to monitor and maintain assets to support any scale of operation or equipment. By suitably employing advanced sensors, actuators, and video, for Asset Monitoring and Maintenance Optimization relays performance data in real-time, to accelerate access to insights that enables truly predictive maintenance.
The asset management solutions help minimize the occurrence of costly and at times, unwarranted scheduled maintenance through condition-based monitoring to optimize asset performance at a minimal cost.
Hitachi's IoT enabled innovative digital asset management solutions in the critical Oil & Natural Gas Industry that offer realtime visibility into asset health is a suitable example.
Compressors are essential to Oil & Natural gas industry. Most of the compressor skids are expensive and tough to maintain. They provide little data vital to delivering insight that would predict and improve operations. Moreover, these compressors are hard to reach and situated in remote locations.
In the absence of access and lack of data, the operators are unable to minimise unplanned downtime and workers are compelled to address compressor issues by investigating the cause and commence subsequent repair. This is a cause of great concern as even a 1% downtime of a single compressor package can accumulate significant loss in gas production over a period of time.(2)
Furthermore, these operations demand years of experience to overcome challenges such as meeting stringent service level agreements for high mechanical availability that escalate the cost of operations.
To help oil and gas producers and service providers monitor asset-intensive environments, Hitachi is developing a proof of concept for an Internet of Things (IoT) solution for Real-Time Machine Event Analytics (Hitachi IoT solution). The Hitachi IoT digital asset management solutions allow operators and service providers to remotely monitor and manage natural gas compressor skids to detect compressor shutdowns, maintain operational efficiencies, predict failures and provide multi-compressor analysis.
Thus, by enabling real-time, remote monitoring of various components such as compressors, engines, and skids, the Hitachi IoT asset management solution allows operators to determine how much time each asset is up and running in a month. It also allows operators to understand emission levels to meet compliance requirements and gain visibility into occupational hazards to reduce escalating health, safety and environmental (HSE) incidents. Equally important, the IoT solution helps companies optimize asset utilization, getting the most from their investment.
The solution helps minimize the occurrence of costly and at times, unwarranted scheduled maintenance through condition-based monitoring to optimize asset performance at a minimal cost.
Predictive Maintenance (PdM)
In Predictive Maintenance (PdM), operational data output is collected through various devices, stored, normalized, and analyzed through practical algorithms based on inferential statistics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence.
PdM solutions leverages IoT techniques like reliability-centred maintenance, overall equipment effectiveness, and analytics to improve maintenance efficiency, asset availability, and Asset lifetime value significantly.
PdM leverages IoT techniques like reliability-centred maintenance, overall equipment effectiveness, and analytics to improve maintenance efficiency, asset availability, and Asset lifetime value significantly.
Benefits
In today's scenario, Predictive Maintenance solutions are of critical importance because customers'efforts are impacted by expanding supply chains, ageing assets, and workforce, volatile prices of raw materials besides a continuously expanding list of compliance norms.
By leveraging advanced algorithms and machine learning principles, Hitachi Consulting Software Services India Pvt. Ltd., a Hitachi Group Company, offers an optimized Asset lifecycle maintenance solution.
Hitachi's Predictive Maintenance Suite significantly contributes to the reduction of maintenance expenses by 10 to 40 percent and reduces downtime by 50%, enabling customers to enhance utilization, reduce maintenance costs and achieve consistent financial returns.
The PdM Solution is steadily making its mark in many sectors, including services that have a profound impact on society. For example, Hitachi Predictive Maintenance Suite is bringing a whole new level of performance transformation and resource optimization to Railways by bringing Social Innovation to the Public Transportation System.
Today, in the critical areas of healthcare, manufacturing, construction, mining, and production, Hitachi is transforming industries by Co-Creating data-led asset management solutions for customers. Such metamorphosis is helping organizations to accelerate the desired transition to Industry 4.0, where the innovative IoT predictive maintenance is serving customers to look beyond just maintenance and repurpose the enormous amount of data for holistic sustainable outcomes for industries, organizations and the society.
Source:
1- https://www.hitachivantara.com/en-us/pdfd/white-paper/use-iot-to-advance-railway-predictive-maintenance-whitepaper.pdf
2- https://social-innovation.hitachi/en-us/think-ahead/manufacturing/predicting-the-future/
