Maintworld 4/2017

4/2017 www.maintworld.com 

maintenance & asset management 

Enabling 

Bigger 

Thinking p 36 

CLOUD INTEGRATED MOBILITY P 16 PREDICT THE UNPREDICTABLE P 28 OPEN INNOVATION MODELS P 48

While we’re known for our world-class motion control products, Moog’s ability to 

maximize your machine uptime doesn’t stop there. Moog Industrial Services provides 

products, services and total support that match your specific O&M needs and 

machinery challenges. 

Download “Lessons Learned” by a Moog maintenance 

expert at info.moog.com/mw. 

REPLACEMENT PRODUCTS/SPARES 

Ensure like-new performance 

with new, authentic Moog 

replacement products that meet 

today’s technical specifications. 

FACTORY REPAIRS 

Rely on high-quality servo repair 

for less unplanned downtime. 

LOCAL SUPPORT 

Work with responsive, locallybased 

Moog teams who speak your 

language and know your industry 

and equipment. 

WHAT MOVES YOUR WORLD

FLEXIBLE PROGRAMS 

Tailor a program for total confidence 

that maintenance is always available. 

ON-SITE TECHNICAL EXPERTS 

Stay productive with quick and 

convenient on-site commissioning, 

set-up and diagnostics for total 

peace of mind. 

HANDS-ON TRAINING 

Gain motion control expertise 

and effectively manage installation 

and troubleshooting. 

©2016 Moog Inc. All rights reserved. 

moogglobalsupport.com

A New Dimension 

in HMI/SCADA 

Introducing the world’s first 3D Holographic 

Machine Interface. ICONICS has redefined “HMI” 

in this era of the Industrial Internet of Things by 

integrating its automation software with Microsoft’s 

HoloLens. This groundbreaking technology allows 

users to superimpose real-time information over a 

real world production environment or facility, reducing 

downtime and increasing operational efficiency. 

Experience it for yourself at SPS IPC Drives 

Visit ICONICS in Hall 7, Stand 394 

Celebrating 30 Years of Automation Software 

www.iconics.com

Servitization – 

Game Changer of 

the Manufacturing 

Industry 

TRADITIONAL BUSINESS MODELS are under pressure across all industries: A 

study from PA Consulting shows that 70% of manufacturing companies that 

were on the Fortune 1000 list ten years ago have disappeared. Survivors include 

market leaders such as IBM, Boeing, General Motors, John Deere, Rolls 

Royce and Philips – i.e. companies that have continuously renewed their offerings 

and redesigned their organisations. 

Historically, the manufacturing industry has focused on products, not 

taking into account the value they could add for their customers. This is no 

longer the case. Companies including Rolls Royce are now harnessing the 

benefits of servitisation. Instead of just selling jet engines, they have developed 

their service portfolio and business model to rely primarily on selling 

lifecycle services using sensors and Internet of Things. Philips Healthcare, 

on the other hand, has moved 

from selling MRI scanners 

to selling scans and are close 

to selling diagnoses based on 

those scans. 

Manufacturing companies 

are searching for new ways 

to gain revenue. As digital 

disruption moves fast forward, 

even larger companies 

must rely on a combination of 

agility and versatility to survive. 

Forming partnerships 

with startup businesses is one way to go forward. According to Finland-based 

Futurice, startups offer traditional manufacturing businesses visibility far 

beyond their own domain. They also function as a platform for brave experiments. 

In this year’s final issue of Maintworld-magazine you may learn how major 

industrial companies are teaming up innovative and agile startups in a bid to 

develop new business models. You will also find the results from a recently 

published market study carried out by Mainnovation and PwC on how predictive 

maintenance 4.0 is expected to drastically change the maintenance 

market in the future. 

Wishing you a successful rest of the year and hope you find our newest edition 

of Maintworld-magazine interesting and inspirational. 

Nina Garlo-Melkas 

Editor-in-Chief of Maintworld-magazine 

6 maintworld 4/2017 

As digital disruption moves 

fast forward, even larger 

companies must rely on a 

combination of agility and 

versatility to survive. 

32 

Though 

the technologies 

have changed, many of 

the challenges remain 

the same: will technicians 

and practitioners accept 

the change and alter their 

behaviour?

IN THIS ISSUE 4/2017 

36 

New technologies such 

as AI may seem exciting, 

but without consistent 

standardisation, 

problems will arise. 

48 

The global startup scene 

is buzzing and CEOs in all 

industries all over the world 

are waking up to the need to 

renew their business. 

8 

12 

16 

20 

Global Service Becomes Part of 

Maintenance Plan 

Connecting Reliability 

Improvement to the Business 

Goals 

Predictive Maintenance + Cloud- 

Integrated Mobility 

Customized Shock Absorbers 

in Turnstile Applications: 

Maintaining Safety and Security 

around the World 

24 

28 

32 

36 

40 

Reliable Flexible Couplings 

Predict the Unpredictable with 

Predictive Maintenance 4.0 

The Latest Technology Trend in 

Condition Monitoring 

Enabling Bigger Thinking 

Effective Backlog Management - 

Part 2 

44 

48 

Maintenance Debt Dictates Your 

Maintenance Cost 

Open Innovation Models Help 

Companies Disrupt Their Own 

Business 

Issued by Promaint (Finnish Maintenance Society), Messuaukio 1, 00520 Helsinki, Finland tel. +358 29 007 4570 Publisher 

Omnipress Oy, Mäkelänkatu 56, 00510 Helsinki, tel. +358 20 6100, toimitus@omnipress.fi, www.omnipress.fi Editor-in-chief 

Nina Garlo-Melkas tel. +358 50 36 46 491, nina.garlo@omnipress.fi, Advertisements Kai Portman, Sales Director, tel. +358 358 

44 763 2573, ads@maintworld.com Subscriptions and Change of Address members toimisto@kunnossapito.fi, non-members 

tilaajapalvelu@media.fi Printed by Painotalo Plus Digital Oy, www.ppd.fi Frequency 4 issues per year, ISSN L 1798-7024, ISSN 

1798-7024 (print), ISSN 1799-8670 (online). 

4/2017 maintworld 7

ASSET MANAGEMENT 

DAVID STOCKING, 

Director of Aftermarket 

Services for Moog, 

dstocking@moog.com. 

About the Author 

David Stocking is director of Aftermarket Services 

for Moog. Stocking has more than 35 

years of experience as a product/project engineering 

manager and operations manager for 

industrial, space and defence applications. He 

received his bachelor’s degree in mechanical 

engineering from Clarkson University. 

Global Service 

Becomes Part of 

Maintenance Plan 

8 maintworld 4/2017


THE MOTION control systems that make 

up a full-flight simulator replicate the 

conditions and forces that pilots routinely 

encounter in flight. The motion 

control system includes a motion base 

with actuators as well as control loading 

and associated software that work seamlessly 

with the instrumentation, seats 

and sophisticated visuals in the cabin. 

The motion base, which includes everything 

below the simulator’s cockpit, 

can typically support payloads of up to 

16,000 kg. 

Keeping these full-flight simulators 

running requires engineering know-how, 

logistics expertise and creative solutions 

for maintenance and repair. Full-flight 

high-performance motion control systems 

for flight simulation, wind energy, 

manufacturing and power generation, 

understands that its flight simulation 

customers must have parts globally 

available for quick and easy access in 

response to planned and unplanned 

repairs. 

The logistics behind making 

repairs 

Moog’s response was to keep a strategic 

inventory of emergency parts in regional 

hubs located in Asia, Europe, and the 

United States, so parts can easily and 

rapidly reach our customers where their 

simulators operate. For the last year 

KEEPING FULL-FLIGHT SIMULATORS RUNNING REQUIRES 

ENGINEERING KNOW-HOW, LOGISTICS EXPERTISE AND 

CREATIVE SOLUTIONS FOR MAINTENANCE AND REPAIR. 

A training facility houses aircraft 

simulator cockpits underpinned by 

Moog motion control systems that 

prepare flight crews for a wide array of 

flying conditions. 

Flying a plane requires 

a special feel. Helping 

pilots learn this feel is 

the mission of the flight 

simulation industry. 

According to Aviation 

Safety magazine, perhaps 

“the most significant 

factor” in helping pilots fly 

safely “is the high-quality 

simulator training airline 

pilots receive from their 

first flight and continuing 

regularly throughout their 

career.” 

simulators commonly strive to achieve 

99.5 percent availability or uptime. The 

continued growth in the number of 

commercial airframes, and the growing 

shortage of pilots, drives most commercial 

flight centres to operate civil flight 

simulators up to 20 hours per day. One 

flight simulator manufacturer – which 

our company, Moog, works with – operates 

a large customer service area with 

wall-size monitors tracking the status of 

simulators. Any simulators that are out 

of operation are highlighted, identifying 

details for the maintenance crews 

working on the simulators. When a 

simulator is not available for training 

and requires maintenance, it can cost between 

US$600 and US$1,500 per hour in 

lost revenue for the simulator operator. 

Compounding this impact is the logistical 

nightmare that results from flight 

crews arriving for periodic flight certification, 

only to find there is no simulator 

on which to train. 

No maintenance professional wants 

to see his or her simulator unavailable 

for training because they can’t quickly 

access a spare part to bring their system 

back online. And although this article 

highlights flight simulation, the pressure 

to keep equipment of all kinds running 

to meet customer demand is similarly 

critical whether it is a wind turbine, 

paper mill or power plant. A company, 

which has a long history of developing 

and a half, we have had a partnership in 

place with UPS Supply Chain Solutions 

(UPS-SCS) for warehousing and logistics 

support. Our partnership has been about 

much more than shipping freight. For 

instance, UPS-SCS consultants examined 

our parts-fulfilment network and 

shipping lanes, resulting in a recommendation 

for optimizing the location of our 

regional stock locations. Once we established 

the global warehouses, we trained 

our 24/7 support team to use UPS-SCS’s 

customer-facing software, thereby responding 

to customer requests for rapid 

dispatch of critical spares anywhere in 

the world. Our support team can now 

handle queries whenever a customer 

logs a maintenance issue from anywhere 

in the world. Moog engineers not only 

have the ability to quickly analyze the 

root cause of a simulator’s failure, but 

also can dispatch parts around the clock. 

Part of the analysis process that we 

went through to set up our response 

to maintenance issues involved giving 

UPS-SCS data on the simulator locations, 

which established maintenance 

trends (e.g., type and quantity of parts, 

geographic locations requesting the 

most parts, etc.) for our simulator business. 

With this, UPS-SCS and Moog were 

able to identify where the best places 

were for warehousing spare parts. For 

example, one location was in The Netherlands, 

another was in the Midwest 



Moog technicians seated in front of a 

motion system address field-service 

requests for flight simulators. 

United States, and a third was in Singapore 

from where we could rapidly reach 

Asian customers. 

With a logistics partner thinking about 

our maintenance solution, we were also 

able to strategize about different approaches 

to shipping, such as choosing 

warehousing locations in duty-free zones, 

thereby minimizing taxes our customers 

would incur. Additional cash-flow 

benefits for our global maintenance 

programme have resulted from UPS-SCS 

providing fiscal representation in Europe 

allowing VAT to be deferred. 

Moog has always been the best source 

of repair for the technology we manufacture, 

but helping our customers keep 

their simulators running has become as 

much about the speed of repair as the 

quality of the workmanship. And by analyzing 

the parts of our process that were 

slowing down our delivery, we have been 

able to expedite help for our customers 

facing a critical maintenance issue. Our 

approach is twofold. Part one is putting in 

place technologies that help Moog and its 

customers get much better at diagnosing 

problems. And the second piece is quickly 

and safely dispatching parts where they 

are needed. 

As for the technology, deterministic diagnostics 

is employed. This gives maintenance 

technicians and simulator owners 

a much clearer picture of what is behind 


a fault indicator. Moog has integrated 

schematics, the physical location of 

components, along with troubleshooting 

directions based on detected faults, and 

supplied this on a disk located on the motion 

control cabinet door. Maintenance 

technicians can load this disk onto their 

computer as needed. Motion base users 

receive a new disk if there are modifications 

to the cabinet after installation by 

Moog personnel. Moog monitors the supply 

chain to determine when to notify industry 

that an item will cease production 

due to the lack of critical components. 

And we offer recommendations for available 

replacement components. 

With regard to dispatching parts, UPS- 

SCS looked at how best to set up central 

stock locations and forward stock locations 

for us. In China, for instance, there 

are a plethora of customs requirements, 

which can take a shipper up to a week or 

more to clear documentation. With a forward 

stocking location in Shanghai and 

a third-party customs clearinghouse, we 

have been able to pre-clear goods to make 

delivery that much faster for our simulator 

customers in China. While it is not 

necessary for every equipment manufacturer 

to have a forward stock location, we 

have found being pre-cleared for customs 

speeds up the process of getting a critical 

part to a customer whose simulator is 

down. 

An evolving partnership 

Even with all the work and processes 

we have put in place with UPS-SCS, 

maintenance is never a static business. 

As our customers’ needs and 

locations change; it is critical to stay 

flexible within whatever construct we 

build for ourselves. Here is an example 

of that kind of thinking from our 

wind energy business: Moog supplies 

its wind turbine customers a battery 

back-up system to power the pitch systems 

that adjust the angle and inclination 

of a turbine’s blades. These are 

critical components that maximize 

the efficiency of a turbine’s output and 

protect a multi-million dollar turbine 

from possible wind damage. A battery 

back-up system‘s charge will degrade 

while sitting on a warehouse shelf for 

extended periods. To be responsive to 

our wind turbine customers’ need for 

a critical part at a moment’s notice, we 

are weighing the merits of supplying 

warehouses with battery trays and instructing 

UPS-SCS on how to charge 

the items prior to shipment. 

Whether a customer wants to keep 

a spare part on his or her own shelf 

or rely on Moog to stock the part at 

a regional stock location, getting our 

customer’s machines up and running 

quickly and safely is our parts-andservice 

goal.

APM Solutions to 

Keep You on Target 

nexusglobal.com/apm

RELIABILITY 

CONNECTING RELIABILITY 

improvement to the business 

goals - don’t just focus on risk 

Most maintenance and reliability professionals understand the benefits of improved 

reliability. Reducing downtime, avoiding costly failure, improving safety and other 

benefits would immediately come to mind. But the question is, do they truly understand 

the impact of reliability measures on reaching set business goals? 

JASON TRANTER, 

CMRP, Mobius Institute, 

jason@mobiusinstitute.com 

THE QUESTION IS, do maintenance and 

reliability professionals truly understand 

why the organization invests in a 

reliability improvement programme? 

Do they measure the success of the reliability 

improvement programme via 

KPIs that reflect the business goals? Do 


they establish asset strategies that focus 

on achieving the business goals? Can 

they (and do they) make it clear to senior 

management how their programme 

helps the management team achieve 

their goals? 

It could be argued that if the answer 

to those questions is “no” then there is a 

problem with the programme, and serious 

questions about the sustainability of 

the programme should be asked. 

In the author’s experience, most 

maintenance and reliability people, 

including condition monitoring technicians 

and analysts, have laser focus on 

mitigating risk. They consider most assets 

“critical” and do their utmost to ensure 

that they do not fail unexpectedly. 

That may result in the following: 

• Performing “preventive maintenance” 

whether those tasks add 

value or not 

• Performing extended “planned 

maintenance” outages regardless 

of whether the maintenance work 

performed is necessary or not 

• Requiring equipment to be shut 

down for maintenance whether 

that is actually the best strategy or 

not

RELIABILITY 

• Holding spares whether it be cost 

effective or not 

• Performing condition monitoring 

tests on machines whether it can be 

justified or not 

• Measuring success based on schedule 

compliance, percentage of 

condition-based versus reactive 

maintenance tasks, reduction in 

unplanned downtime, and other 

metrics that relate more to the execution 

of the programme rather 

than the goals of the business 

A person who did not know any better 

might consider that the asset strategy 

was purely designed to cover their 

backsides. Failure cannot occur on their 

watch. Therefore failure must be avoided 

at all cost. Yes, failure will harm the business, 

and must be avoided. But in the 

process of reducing those risks we may 

also increase our maintenance costs and 

reduce our capacity. We must balance the 

cost of avoiding failure with the cost to the 

business. 

What would you do if you 

were CEO? 

If you were to put yourself in the shoes of 

a CEO of a manufacturing business, what 

do you think your priorities would be? 

1. The CEO will have performance 

targets. Whether they are in place 

to meet the objectives of the private 

owners of the business, or public investors 

and shareholders, they must 

achieve those targets. Their future, 

(and the value of their bonuses), 

depends on it. 

2. The CEO must protect the brand 

of the organization. That includes 

keeping key customers happy and 

staying out of the news because of 

some form of disaster. 

3. The CEO must appease the regulators 

and insurers. 

When asked, a ‘C’ level manager said 

the goal of their mining company was to 

“turn as much rock into as much money 

as possible”. Maintenance and reliability-improvement 

activities can help the 

company achieve that goal, but only with 

the right asset strategy. 

Any proposal to the CEO (or other 

senior level management) will be measured 

against these goals. What will it 

cost, what is the likelihood of success, 

and what are the benefits? To win their 

support you have to show how improved 

reliability is a good, safe investment. And 

at least annually, you need to remind 

them how you are delivering on that investment 

and how you are helping them 

achieve their goals. 

The same questions need to be asked 

of senior management of public utilities, 

senior military officials, and so on. You 

need to know what they hope to achieve 

and make it crystal clear how improving 

reliability helps them achieve their goals. 

Isn’t it all about risk? 

Reliability improvement programmes, 

and the design of asset strategies, typically 

focus on the need to understand 

and mitigate risk. An asset criticality 

ranking will be developed so that priority 

can be given to the assets that pose the 

greatest risk. And there is no doubt that 

risk management is important. However, 

in the author’s opinion, too much focus 

is given to avoiding the “bad things” and 

too little focus is on achieving the “good 

things”. 

“Good things” and 

“bad things”? 

If we step back for a moment, still wearing 

the shoes of the CEO, we could 

perhaps consider four points of pressure 

– four aspects that affect the business. 

Let’s call it the “business process 

review”. 

First, we have the performance targets 

that drive the business: achieving 

shareholder value, delivering a return to 

the business owners, etc. It is essential 

that you understand what those targets 

are. The true measure of success of your 

reliability improvement programme is 

whether the business can achieve these 

targets. 

Second, we have to consider the constraints 

on the business; what stops 

the business from being able to achieve 

those targets. Those constraints may include 

the availability of capital, cash flow, 

availability of raw materials, etc. We have 

to keep those constraints in mind. When 

we choose our asset strategies we may 

need to consider which have the lowest 

costs, which conserve cash, which results 

in the lowest waste, etc. 

Third, now we can consider risk. 

What are all the “bad things” that can 

harm the business? Equipment failure 

can result in safety incidents, harm to 

the environment, extended periods of 

downtime, expensive repairs, and harm 

to our customers. We have to consider 

these risks and prioritize our asset strategy 

according to the severity and consequences 

of these risks. 

And forth, we have to consider how 

improved reliability presents an opportunity 

for us to achieve those targets, 

something that is rarely done in the 

author’s experience. If the goal of the 

business is to produce high quality product 

at a defined production volume, then 

we need to turn our minds to how our 

asset strategy will enable those goals to 

be met. Rather than just thinking about 

how we can stop the “bad things” from 

happening, we have to think about how 

we can make the “good things” happen. 

You may be thinking that the opportunities 

are just the opposite of the risks. 

They are and they aren’t. 

MOST MAINTENANCE AND RELIABILITY PEOPLE 

HAVE LASER FOCUS ON MITIGATING RISK. 

When we focus on the risks associated 

with downtime for example, we will 

consider the types of failure that will 

result in extended downtime. We should 

consider proactive tasks that reduce the 

likelihood of developing the fault conditions, 

and we will monitor the equipment 

so that we are forewarned. But now 

we need to turn our minds to everything 

that can be done so that the equipment 

delivers peak performance; the highest 

quality, highest throughput, most efficient 

start-up, minimal interruption at 

shift changeover or product changeover, 

and yes, the least number of breakdowns. 

Imagine sitting in a room with operators, 

maintenance people, and engineering, 

and focusing your attention on 

what makes the plant achieve its best 

performance. In a separate meeting you 

can discuss how you can avoid failure. In 

this meeting the focus will be achieving 

the targets. You are wearing a different 

hat now. It is an important perspective, 

and it is a perspective that enables the 

business to maximize its opportunities. 

What can we do with this 

information? 

The bottom line is that we need an asset 

strategy that considers these four areas. 


RELIABILITY 

YOU CAN’T IMPROVE RELIABILITY UNLESS EVERYONE IN 

THE ORGANIZATION IS INVOLVED. 

That strategy will need to change with 

time (as the constraints on the business 

change). And that asset strategy will 

definitely be different in different areas 

of the business, and different areas of the 

plant. For example, there will be areas of 

the production process that can tolerate 

small amounts of downtime, whereas in 

the final assembly for example, production 

lost due to downtime, slowdowns 

and minor stoppages can never be recovered. 

management is not fully on board with 

the concept of reliability improvement, 

you will never achieve that goal. And 

senior management will only be fully 

on board if they see how a reliable plant 

helps them achieve their goals. 

Conclusion 

If you understand how reliability improvement 

enables the business to 

achieve its goals, and you can quantify 

those benefits, and you can articulate 

those benefits to senior management, 

then you will gain their support. With 

that support you will have the essential 

ingredient to developing the culture 

of reliability (because without that the 

programme cannot achieve its full potential). 

Now you must maintain that focus so 

that your asset strategy, and every decision 

you make (and dollar you spend), 

adds value to the business. 

If you continuously communicate the 

value you are delivering, you will maintain 

the senior management support, 

you will continue to improve the culture, 

and the reliability improvement initiative 

will be sustained for many years. 

Why is all this important? 

It is important for two reasons. First, you 

need the support of senior management 

because ultimately, they control funding. 

While a lot of good reliability improvement 

tasks can be performed “under the 

radar” with budgets managed at a much 

lower level, the true benefits cannot be 

gained in this “stealth” mode. 

Second, and much more importantly, 

is that you can’t improve reliability unless 

everyone in the organization is involved. 

You must have a “culture of reliability”. 

Everyone involved in design, procurement, 

engineering, spares management, 

work management, and especially operations/production 

must understand what 

they can do to improve reliability so that 

the business achieves its goals. If senior 

An asset criticality ranking will be developed so that priority can be given to the assets 

that pose the greatest risk. 


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MEASUREMENT DIVISION

INDUSTRIAL INTERNET 

Predictive Maintenance + 

Cloud-Integrated Mobility 

MELISSA TOPP, 

Senior Director of 

Global Marketing, 

ICONICS, 

melissa@iconics.com 

Recent technological developments in automation software 

have led to some pretty interesting possibilities 

in maintenance for organizations around the world. 

Multiple breakthroughs have combined in order to enhance 

the productivity and efficiency involved with 

equipment checkups and repair. 



put down your toolbox. 

“Piece of cake,” you think as you quickly resolve the problem. 

Just as you finish up, you receive an additional message on 

your heads-up display: “While you’re there…”. 

The combination of technologies at work in such a scenario 

involve Fault Detection and Diagnostics (FDD), cloud computing, 

and a groundbreaking new HMI/SCADA user experience 

with wearable devices. Each of these separate pieces provide 

the necessary features to free up maintenance personnel to be 

more proactive with time and resources, rather than continuously 

chasing break-fix instances or putting out fires. 

Fault Detection and Diagnostics 

Fault Detection and Diagnostics software analyzes all available 

information to detect and predict faults. It utilizes algorithms 

that weigh probabilities of faults and advises management, 

operators and maintenance personnel of actions to prevent 

equipment failures or excessive energy use. When failures 

occur, current and historical information are analyzed, along 

with symptom/cause relationships that the system has been 

taught. 

• Information received from such software can be used to: 

• Predict, reduce and eliminate equipment downtime 

• Automate fault detection and deliver real-time notifications 

(anywhere, any time and via any platform) to maintenance 

personnel and management 

• Reduce maintenance time and determine probable causes 

• Improve reliability and control 

IMAGINE THIS SCENARIO. You are a maintenance technician 

for Company X, an international manufacturer with locations 

scattered across the world. Your responsibilities include 

maintaining the machinery involved in producing the company’s 

popular products. On a typical day, you receive a work 

order that might include a brief summary of a single piece of 

malfunctioning equipment, in a certain location, about which 

you’ve hopefully received enough training and background in 

order to return it to normal operation. All in all, a pretty regular 

maintenance job, right? 

Let’s update the scenario a bit. Once onsite, you put on your 

mobile holographic computer, such as a Microsoft HoloLens 

holographic computing device or an HMT-1 head mounted tablet 

class industrial wearable from RealWear. You approach the 

equipment in question and immediately see a pop-up 2D or 3D 

representation of the equipment’s internal pieces. You already 

see possible symptoms and causes listed by likelihood, along 

with accessible links to more in-depth schematics and step-bystep 

repair videos. All this has happened, in an augmented reality 

field of vision right in front of you, onsite, before you even


Cloud Computing 

Many organizations are increasingly considering the benefits 

of moving the bulk of their data processing and analytics from 

on site to the cloud. Advantages of such a move include: 

• Increased Scalability – The computing load can now be 

spread over multiple/newer hardware, and accessed from 

anywhere, at any time, from any web-connected device. 

• Reduced Hardware Obsolescence – In turn, an organization’s 

on-premises computing hardware will continue to 

get older and less likely to handle increasing required data 

speeds and storage capacity. Making the decision to switch 

to cloud-based alternatives means less time and expense 

spent on maintaining aging equipment. 

• Expanded Connectivity – Using a cloud-based computing 

solution comes with multiple integrated communication 

protocols (e.g., AMQP, MQTT, HTTPS, REST/JSON). 

Some organizations may be early in the process of considering 

connecting equipment to the Industrial Internet of Things 

and may be able to afford to purchase equipment with such 

networking capabilities built in. Others, with older existing 

equipment, may be able to afford retrofits to gain that ability. 

However, many organizations may consider an alternative in 

the utilization of “edge” devices, also known as IoT gateways. 

These IoT devices can also come pre-installed with IoT 

software, and provide additional utility, such as establishing 

a connection from on-premises data through an IoT Hub to 

a preferred cloud services provider, such as Microsoft Azure 

or Amazon Web Services, through to consuming applications 

such as mobile HMI/SCADA visualization, rapid data historian 

storage/retrieval, advanced analytics (including energy 

management and fault detection/diagnostics), and more. Plus, 

in addition to Northbound communication protocols, the IoT 

software suite can integrate with Southbound protocols as well 

(e.g. OPC Classic, OPC UA, Modbus, SNMP, BACnet). 

Wearable Device Technology 

In 2015, Microsoft introduced its self-contained holographic 

computing device: the HoloLens. The head-mounted computer 

provides a three-dimensional augmented reality (AR) view 

of process data. Soon after, ICONICS introduced the world’s 

first 3D Holographic Machine Interface as part of version 10.95 

of its GENESIS64 HMI/SCADA and Building Automation 

Suite. Recently, RealWear, out of Milpitas, California, introduced 

the world’s first industrial head-mounted android tablet, 

and announced integration with ICONICS HMI software technology. 

This combination of ICONICS software with hardware 

like the HMT-1 from RealWear allows users to visualize realtime 

and historical data KPIs with voice driven, hands-free 

usage. 

Featuring an intuitive, completely hands-free interface, 

the RealWear HMT-1 is a fully rugged head-worn solution for 

industrial IoT data visualization, remote video collaboration, 

technical documentation, assembly and maintenance instructions 

and streamlined inspections right to the eyes and ears of 

workers in harsh and loud field and manufacturing environments. 

Mobile holographic computing devices provide maintenance 

personnel with a hands-free way to utilize data-driven 

displays for quick problem resolution. Operators can check 

real-time status of devices from anywhere across the globe, 

with the ability to drill down to individual equipment KPIs for 

immediate analysis and real-time information-based decisionmaking. 

While You’re There… 

Let’s return to our scenario, in your job as Company X maintenance 

technician. That initial service ticket certainly was a 

piece of cake, when you were provided with all the required 

information, including movable 3D internal schematics, a 

manufacturer’s guide in PDF format, and even a live video chat 

with a senior technician who has worked on that same type of 

equipment before – all in a heads-up display superimposed 

over your live view of the equipment requiring service. 

COMBINING MOBILE HOLOGRAPHIC MACHINE 

INTERFACES WITH CLOUD-CONNECTED DATA 

CAN FURTHER THE PROACTIVE ASPECT OF 

PREDICTIVE MAINTENANCE. 

Just as you’re finishing your repair, returning the machine 

to normal operation, you get a message through your mobile 

device, “While you’re there, how about taking care of a few 

things that could have been trouble later on? Here’s the path to 

the panel I need you to look at.” Just then, you automatically 

see an arrow pointing you in the direction you need to follow. 

(Your heads-up display happens to use software that integrates 

with GPS, as well as with NFC, OCR, barcodes, and QR codes.) 

It takes you through the facility and just as you approach the 

next piece of equipment in need of repair, you see the same superimposed 

info to once again help you work quickly. 

Combining mobile holographic machine interfaces with 

cloud-connected data can certainly further the proactive 

aspect of predictive maintenance. In our scenario, the maintenance 

technician had quickly taken care of what necessitated 

the initial job ticket. The combination of these several technologies 

helped save an additional trip to the same location, and 

the associated expenses, by identifying what additional problems 

could be prevented then and there. 


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RELIABILITY 

The reliability of 

pedestrian turnstiles is 

critical to public safety. 

To keep them running 

smoothly, manufacturers 

use customised shock 

absorbers. 

Text: DIETER KLAIBER, Project & Application Manager, ITT Enidine, dieter.klaiber@itt.com 

Customised Shock Absorbers 

in Turnstile Applications: 

Maintaining Safety and Security 

around the World 

From amusement parks to high-security buildings and public transportation, pedestrian 

turnstiles are used around the world to control traffic flow and keep people 

and businesses safe. Turnstile technology can come in many forms, such as fullheight, 

tripod and sliding gate, all monitoring capacity, while controlling security. 

Subjected to harsh, high cycle-rate environments, turnstile reliability is critical to 

public safety, and that is why pedestrian turnstile manufacturers utilize customized 

shock absorbers to keep equipment running smoothly. 


RELIABILITY 

IN A TURNSTILE application, one of the 

biggest issues is user safety. With no 

shock absorber, the turnstile bars can 

bounce back and cause injury, which is 

a large concern when millions of people 

use turnstiles every day for business, 

travel and recreational purposes. 

In tripod turnstiles, shock absorbers 

provide smooth and consistent 

dampening for the rotational movement, 

preventing the tri-arm bars 

from swinging too quickly or banging 

at the end of the rotation. These units 

protect the turnstile and are tuned 

specifically to withstand the energy 

delivered by the rotational movement 

of each turnstile application. Once a 

person enters the turnstile, he or she 

exerts force on the arm until a certain 

point in its rotation, and then the arm 

drops automatically to the next position. 

The shock absorbers are mounted 

so that they absorb the energy of 

the arm when it drops back to the rest 

position. 

The benefits of customengineered 

shock absorption 

In some applications, shock absorbers 

do not provide enough resistance to the 

increased mass and force applied during 

operation, but redesigning the unit for a 

larger type of shock absorber would be 

very costly and time consuming to the 

manufacturer. A custom-designed shock 

absorber can meet these larger mass 

and drive force requirements, providing 

significant savings to the customer for 

a modest investment. By designing and 

developing a modified standard shock absorber 

into a specific application, manufacturers 

save time and cost associated 

with redesigning a turnstile unit to fit a 

standard motion control product. 

Adjustable shock absorbers are another 

type of custom shock-absorber 

product that should be considered for 

industries where the turnstiles will experience 

increasing and decreasing flow 

demand. By allowing for adjustments to 

the rate and energy absorption, adjustable 

shock absorbers offer manufacturers 

the ability to protect equipment and 

extend machine life, while maintaining 

or expanding output. In amusement park 

applications for example, the ability to 

enter the park and ride waiting areas 

smoothly are as critical to the experience 

as the ride itself. The turnstiles in these 

applications experience increasing and 

decreasing rates of use by hour and season, 

but remain critical to ensuring customers 

are safe. Shock absorbers are key 

to serving industries around the world 

and providing rate control and energy 

absorption solutions for lasting operation 

of turnstiles and gates. 

When designing a shock absorber for 

a turnstile application, manufacturers 

should consider the size, force capacity 

and stroke needed for their specific 

function. The shock absorber may be 

handling children, adults, or even cattle 

and the turnstile application, from a 

business entrance to a busy sports arena, 

could vary greatly. Think about public 

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CONTROLLING MAINTENANCE, CREATING VALUE.

RELIABILITY 

“Shock absorbers protect turnstile 

machinery eliminating machinery damage, 

reducing downtime and maintenance costs, 

and increasing lifespan and reliability. 

SHOCK ABSORBERS PROTECT 

TURNSTILE MACHINERY BY 

OFFERING PREDICTABLE, 

RELIABLE AND CONTROLLED 

DECELERATION. 

transportation. You have people crossing 

through turnstiles, from small kids 

to adults, which means you have different 

weights and different speeds, which 

creates different forces. These varying 

weights, speeds and forces that have to 

be absorbed need to be considered when 

choosing an off-the-shelf or designing a 

custom-engineered shock absorber for 

a turnstile. To have the best design for 

these turnstile applications, manufacturers 

should look to experienced engineers 

to design a shock absorber to meet 

all of those requirements and conditions. 

20 years and 25 million cycles: Automatic 

Systems’ tripod turnstiles built to 

last with Enidine shock absorption 

Automatic Systems is a world leader 

in the automation of secure entrance 

control, with more than 19 million people 

in 25 different countries using their 

equipment daily. Automatic Systems 

designs and manufactures vehicle, pedestrian 

and passenger-access control 

equipment, including public transport, 

security entrance lanes, tripod turnstiles 

“In tripod turnstiles, 

shock absorbers provide 

smooth and consistent 

dampening for the 

rotational movement, 

preventing the tri-arm 

bars from swinging too 

quickly or banging at 

the end of the rotation. 


and full-height turnstiles. 

For more than 20 years, Enidine has 

worked closely with Automatic Systems 

to supply shock absorption solutions for 

their tripod turnstile applications. Enidine’s 

shock absorbers protect turnstile 

equipment at an extremely high cycle 

rate for robust and reliable performance, 

perfectly suiting them for typical heavyuse 

tripod turnstile sites, such as leisure 

centres, stadiums and factories. 

Installed over 20 years ago and surpassing 

25 million cycles, Automatic 

Systems’ oldest tripod turnstiles, featuring 

Enidine shock absorbers, are still 

in place and working today. Over the 

course of the past 20 years, some Automatic 

System customers have needed to 

replace the stainless steel casing of the 

turnstiles due to typical wear-and-tear 

damage after years of use, but the installed 

Enidine shock absorber system is 

still meeting cycle rate and safety standards, 

with no need for replacement. 

In keeping with their reputation for 

service and support, approximately 

five years ago, Enidine was required to 

adjust their shock absorber design to 

meet new regulations. Automatic Systems 

received outstanding support from 

the Enidine engineers, as they were 

required to perform extensive testing 

over the course of several months and 

several million cycles. As their clients 

depend on reliable turnstiles, Automatic 

Systems did not want to take any risks. 

Ultimately, Enidine provided a modified 

shock absorber design that withstood 

the extensive testing and met global 

regulations in a fast turnaround time. 

Automatic Systems was fully satisfied 

and maintained their longstanding 

relationship with Enidine. Automatic 

Systems is extremely pleased with the 

reliable, attentive service provided by 

Enidine engineers. 

Protect equipment; reduce 

cost and downtime; increase 

reliability and lifespan 

Shock absorbers protect turnstile machinery 

by offering predictable, reliable 

and controlled deceleration. In addition 

to the human safety aspect, harmful side 

effects of motion, such as noise, vibration 

and damaging impacts, are moderated 

or eliminated. This eliminates 

machinery damage, reduces downtime 

and maintenance costs, and increases 

turnstile lifespan and reliability. Additionally, 

the flexibility provided by some 

shock absorbers means turnstiles can 

operate at higher cycle rates and, if required, 

can be designed to meet specified 

safety standards. 

The customizable design and development 

of shock absorbers in turnstile 

applications is critical to increasing 

safety and prolonging machinery lifespan. 

With so many variations in weight, 

speed, energy and environments, turnstile 

manufacturers need highly engineered 

parts to ensure people around 

the world continue to stay safe and 

secure.

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CONDITION MONITORING 

Reliable 

Flexible 

Couplings 

Figure 3 - 

SDT270DU: 

ultrasound 

and vibration 

input 

Simon is a condition monitoring specialist from a local 

oil refinery. He contacted my office for advice about 

predicting flexible coupling failures. Currently, they 

perform basic vibration analysis on their pumps and 

motors using an overall meter. They have some success 

predicting bearing failures but the same cannot 

be said for couplings. Several unexpected failures shut 

them down this year. 

ALLAN RIENSTRA, 

SDT International, , 

allan@sdthearmore.com 

About the Author 

Allan Rienstra is the director of business development for SDT International, a Brussels-based 

manufacturer of ultrasound solutions comprised of hardware, software, training and consulting. 

A 25-year commitment to ultrasound applications has seen Rienstra play a leading role in the 

deployment of ultrasound-based solutions in 5 continents. He is the co-author of “Hear More, 

A Guide to Using Ultrasound for Leak Detection and Condition Monitoring.” Rienstra lives in 

Cobourg, Ontario, Canada with his wife and two sons. 

WITHIN THE FACILITY, 58 pump 

systems considered “A Critical” were 

identified, meaning if they go down, the 

plant goes down. I suggested ultrasound 

as a fast, safe, and affordable solution. 

Specifically, the SDT270DU offered the 

best value. Not only could Simon use it 

to monitor couplings with ultrasound, it 

could also take vibration measurements, 

thus eliminating the need for Simon to 

carry two data collectors. 

Flexible couplings cannot be monitored 

with vibration analysis for two 

reasons. First, there is no suitable contact 

point for an accelerometer. Second, 

the primary defect symptoms, friction 

and impacting, are best measured with 

ultrasound. By placing an airborne 

sensor near to the coupling Simon can 

quickly trend an evolving defect. The 

SDT270DU gives Simon the choice to 

either spot check for defects – good – or 

integrate all 58 couplings into his established 

bearing routes – best. 

I explained to Simon how several 

clients already trend couplings using the 

Flexible Wand. The SDT270 collects a 

STATIC ultrasound measurement that 

gives four indicators of condition. The 

first two – Overall RMS and Max RMS – 

indicate the level of friction produced by 

the defect. When these indicators rise, 

maintenance may consider corrective 

alignment during a planned shutdown. 

The second two – Peak and Crest Factor 

– identify the emergence of impacting. 

Together, all four indicators establish a 

lifecycle trend for each coupling. 

Once impacting appears, the Peak 

indicator increases in step with Overall 

Figure 1 - 

Flexible 

Coupling and 

Airborne 

Ultrasound 

Sensor 

ANY ULTRASOUND INSPECTOR WORKING AROUND ROTATING 

EQUIPMENT MUST BE REQUIRED TO DEMONSTRATE AN 

UNDERSTANDING OF COMPANY SAFETY POLICIES. 



Figure 4 - Measuring ultrasound without user defined 

acquisition time results in missed data points 

Figure 5 - User defined acquisition time samples 

the complete signal resulting in more reliable, 

meaningful data 

Figure 2 - 

A Flexible 

Wand from SDT 

detects friction 

and impacting 

from a flexible 

coupling 

RMS. Since Crest Factor (CF) is a ratio between 

RMS and Peak, a rising CF indicates 

that the window for simple maintenance 

has narrowed. At this stage inspectors 

collect a DYNAMIC measurement. The 

DYNAMIC measurement gives a visual 

representation of friction and impacting 

severity using the time view. For both 

STATIC and DYNAMIC measurements it 

is important to define the signal acquisition 

time. 

User defined signal acquisition time, 

available exclusively on SDT instruments, 

is a luxury that lends ultrasound 

technicians the highest level of precision. 

Without the ability to set the sample time, 

inspectors must guess when to pull the 

measurement trigger, and question the 

validity of their data. Simon explained 

that all 58 pumps turn at speeds above 

1800 RPM. Accordingly, he should set 

his SDT270’s signal acquisition time to 

between one and three seconds. One to 

three seconds at 1800 RPM samples the 

coupling for 30-90 revolutions. 

Shaft couplings are guarded 

for safety 

Any ultrasound inspector working around 

rotating equipment must be required to 

demonstrate an understanding of company 

safety policies. Safety considerations 

are engineered into SDT sensors. The 

Flexible Wand’s 10mm diameter sensor 

is designed to access the coupling with 

the safety guard in place (see figure 2). 

The 21” long sensor sports a comfortable, 

ergonomic grip that allows an inspector to 

collect danger-free data. 

Simon seemed convinced, but wanted 

to hear more. Since this solution was 

already working well at a nearby paper 

mill, I introduced Simon to the plant 

manager, Sunil, and invited them both 

to lunch. Sunil and Simon connected on 

so many common reliability issues that 

afternoon. He confirmed the affordability 

of this solution was based on coupling 

failures alone but went on to explain how 

their mill was rolling out ultrasound for 

acoustic lubrication, steam trap monitoring, 

electrical inspection, and air leak 

management. Simon and Sunil continued 

their conversation well into the afternoon. 

They agreed that ultrasound, with its 8 

primary applications for reliability, represented 

a fast, safe, and affordable technology 

with the potential to revolutionize reliability 

culture. I sat back, happily watching 

two impassioned specialists strategize 

about reliability culture. I love my job. 


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Text: NINA GARLO-MELKAS, Maintworld-magazine 

Predict the 

Unpredictable with 

PREDICTIVE 

MAINTENANCE 4.0 

Predictive maintenance 4.0 is expected to drastically change the maintenance market. 

Besides the traditional reliability engineer we will begin to see new roles in the 

maintenance & asset management department: the data scientist. 

PDM 4.0 is seen increasing the predictability 

of the assets and the processes. 

Companies that apply PdM 4.0 will have 

a strategic advantage to their peers that 

steer away from PdM 4.0, a market study 

carried out by Mainnovation and PwC 

reveals. 

– The potential benefits of PmD 4.0 

are very high. If maintenance has the 

ability to predict “unpredictable failures” 

we can take a big step in competitiveness. 

On the other hand, there are 

some major challenges: PdM 4.0 requires 

a huge change. A lot of companies focus 

on the technical and technological 

change, but underestimate the organizational 

implementation, says Partner at 

Mainnovation Peter Decaigny. 

PdM 4.0 requires a complete culture 

change: PdM 4.0 tools will have another 

position in the decision process. The 

tools will suggest the moment to stop an 

installation or to change process parameters. 

This has to be embedded in the 

daily operations. 

The study that was executed between 

October 2016 and June 2017 was conducted 

in three countries: Belgium, Germany 

and the Netherlands. A total of 280 

respondents submitted their answers. 

– We have seen that many companies 

are ambitious when it comes to PdM 

4.0; half of the companies we surveyed 

have plans to implement PdM 4.0, one in 

three wants to do so within the next five 

years. We have also seen that companies’ 

current predictive maintenance capabilities 

are not yet at the level needed for 

PdM 4.0. We can conclude that significant 

efforts and resources will be needed 

to implement PdM 4.0, Decaigny says. 

According to Decaigny, uptime improvement 

is the main reason why respondents 

have plans for PdM 4.0. Other 

important reasons relate to other traditional 

value drivers in maintenance and 

asset management such as cost reductions, 

lifetime extension for ageing assets 

and the reduction of safety, health, environment 

and quality risks. Respondents 

also identified a number of critical success 

factors for PdM 4.0 implementation. 

The availability of data was mentioned 

most often as a critical success factor, followed 

by technology, budget and culture. 

– At this early stage in the PdM 4.0 

lifecycle, companies still see considerable 

technical obstacles to its implementation. 

However, they recognize that 

PdM 4.0 implementation is not a purely 

technical challenge. Companies should 

also pay attention to organisational 

dimensions, and ensure the project management 

and change management skills 

needed for a successful PdM 4.0 implementation. 

Building data analytics 

capabilities 

Success with PdM 4.0 will ultimately depend 

on skills and knowledge. The report 

shows that lack of skills or competencies 

in the company’s workforce is the biggest 

challenge respondents see when it 

comes to using data analytics. 

– We found that only 27% of our survey 

respondents currently employ reliability 

engineers in predictive mainte- 



nance, and even fewer (8%) employ data 

scientists. Companies’ biggest obstacle, 

thus, may be their ability to recruit the 

people needed to put PdM 4.0 in place. 

Companies generally understand that 

it is critical to have in-house data analytics 

capabilities in order to successfully 

drive Industry 4.0 applications. Building 

these capabilities takes, however, far 

more than hiring new talent with PhD’s 

in statistics, data science or AI. 

– No matter how much talent companies 

bring on board, these talents will not 

be as effective as they could be without 

the right organisation and governance 

in place. Perhaps the most important 

aim of designing a PdM 4.0 governance 

structure is to create an environment 

in which data scientists and reliability 

engineers can interact and complement 

each other. 

A good first step for companies considering 

how to best arrange their data 

analytics could be crossfunctional expert 

teams with reliability engineers, operators, 

process technologists, data scientists 

and IT specialists who together 

develop new ways of working and communicating. 

All such aspects of a PdM 

4.0 implementation require a robust a 

digital culture. 

– PdM 4.0 cannot be implemented in 

complete isolation within the maintenance 

organisation. It should be embedded 

into an overall digital manufacturing 

strategy that is owned and fully supported 

by top management. 

Who are the front-runners 

in PdM? 

Companies with similar assets are further 

ahead in terms of predictive maintenance 

than companies with unique 

assets. This can be attributed to the fact 

that a base of similar assets provides a 

richer data set for advanced analytics. 

Looking across business sectors, the 

rail sector seems to be a front-runner in 

applying PdM 4.0: 42% of respondents 

in the rail sector are at level 4, compared 

to 11% overall. This confirms our perception 

of the rail sector as being innovative 

and sophisticated in the field of maintenance. 

Comparing the three countries targeted 

in the survey, PdM 4.0 is more 

popular in Belgium (23%) than in the 

Netherlands (6%) and Germany (2%). 

Belgium is also considered a front-runner 

in real-time condition monitoring. 

CASE: Growing Pressure on 

Infrabel’s Maintenance 

Infrabel is the state-owned company responsible 

for Belgian rail infrastructure. 

Infrabel spends around a billion euros 

each year on the management, maintenance 

and development of rail infrastructure, 

which contains over 3,600 kilometres 

of railway lines, 86 signal boxes, 

10,249 main signals and almost 12,000 

civil infrastructure works like crossings, 

bridges and tunnels. Over 4,200 trains 

run on the Belgian railways each day, and 

the number of daily passengers has in- 

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creased by 50% since 2000, to 800,000. 

Pressure to improve the safety and 

reliability of rail infrastructure has also 

increased for a number of reasons: 

• Safety is of paramount importance. 

To improve safety for its employees, 

for example, Infrabel wants to reduce 

the number of visual inspections by 

maintenance crews walking along the 

tracks. 

• The railway network is becoming 

increasingly strained. Not only due 

to an increase in passengers and 

freight trains, but also because new 

high-performance trains exert greater 

stress on the tracks. A busier schedule 

also means smaller windows of opportunity 

for maintenance. Planned 

downtime must be communicated to 

railway operators a couple of years in 

advance. 

• The general public and governments 

are demanding safety and accuracy. 

Every incident is negative publicity 

for Infrabel and further increases 

pressure to prevent future incidents. 

• In the coming years, Infrabel will be 

confronted by a wave of retirements 

and will have to find ways to replace 

the knowledge and experience it will 

be losing. 

• There is a trade-off between safety 

and reliability. The installed base of 

smart assets needed to monitor and 


improve safety is accompanied by 

additional susceptibility to failures 

compared to the old dumb assets, and 

hence necessitates additional maintenance. 

Making dumb hardware smart 

In response to these challenges, Infrabel 

has invested heavily in automating a 

number of maintenance processes. It has 

become exceptionally strong in developing 

innovative condition monitoring 

tools such as sophisticated measurement 

trains for inspecting tracks, railway ties 

and overhead lines; cameras mounted on 

overpasses to monitor the panthographs 

of passing trains; sensors for detecting 

overheating in shaft sleeves on passing 

trains; semi-automatic vehicles to check 

whether sign-post visibility meets the 

regulatory requirements; and meters 

to detect drifts in power consumption, 

which usually occur prior to mechanical 

failures in switches. 

Building organisational 

foundations 

A number of organisational changes will 

be encountered when deploying smart 

condition monitoring tools. The once 

very fragmented maintenance organisation 

has been fused into larger units in 

order to reap synergy-related benefits. 

At Infrabel headquarters in Brussels, a 

central Data Cell has been created where 

increasing volumes of data generated by 

these tools are collected and analysed. 

A wide range of home-made IT applications 

for maintenance is being replaced 

by a single tool where data from various 

systems is integrated and standardized. 

A number of pilot projects to test predictive 

analytics in maintenance have been 

started, and Infrabel is currently recruiting 

data scientists to take its maintenance 

operations to the next level. 

On the eve of a new era in 

maintenance 

By making these preparations, Infrabel 

has put itself in an excellent position for 

the large-scale application of data analytics 

in maintenance. Even though this implementation 

could face a few regulatory 

hurdles - stemming from strict safety requirements 

and current regulations that 

prescribe a minimum number of visual 

inspections per year, Infrabel is still expected 

to make progress in this area. 

That would be a major step along 

the way of what Infrabel, describes as 

“a complete transformation of Infrabel 

into a digital enterprise in which ‘basic’ 

assets are replaced by smart assets that 

are integrated in an Internet of Things. 

This transformation enables Infrabel to 

become increasingly data-driven in its 

decision-making.”


The 4Cast from UE Systems is 

the latest innovation in assets’ 

remote monitoring using 

ultrasound 

The Latest Technology Trend in 


The ability to monitor the condition of assets 24/7, from any location, is becoming 

the new trend in maintenance practices. Ultrasound, being a key technology in condition 

monitoring, will play a key role in this trend. 



ADRIAN MESSER, 

CMRP, 

adrianm@uesystems.com 

JUST AS TECHNOLOGY has been rapidly 

developing in fields like telecom, 

data analytics, smart devices and infrastructure, 

the same can be said of asset 

condition monitoring. Just how far has 

technology come in asset maintenance, 

and what does that mean going forward? 

What current technology is the equivalent 

of cutting-edge developments in 

those other fields – playing the role of 

RFID or Internet of Things? For asset 

maintenance, it is remote monitoring – 

the ability for technicians to utilize 

modern tools to collect and parse 

through continuous data sets from a 

given asset without the need for 24/7 

in-person attention. 

It is important to recognize that new 

technology often calls into question old 

methodologies or habits. Each time some 

development emerges, the industry involved 

must adapt to make best use from 

it. That can be particularly difficult in 

the industrial setting, often driven by the 

mantra, “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it.” 

But plant maintenance technicians 

have increasingly recognized the benefits 

of predictive maintenance in terms 

of keeping equipment online, preventing 

unplanned shutdowns, increasing plant 

efficiency and saving money for the organization. 

The paradigm shifts of asset 

condition monitoring 

The book “Asset Condition Monitoring 

Management” by Jack Nicholas, Jr., 

outlines four ways asset condition monitoring 

has changed over the decades, 

including nowadays: 

1. In the 1980s, microprocessors 

made way for more portable data 

collection devices. 

2. In the 1990s, laptops emerged 

while software packages gave all 

computers better memory storage. 

3. In the 2000s, wireless data transfer 

arrived as the methods for reporting 

and analysing data grew 

more sophisticated. 

4. In this decade, the condition 

monitoring paradigm shifts include 

Internet of Things, cloud 

computing, big data, tablets, virtual 

and augmented reality, wearable 

devices and so on. 

Though the technologies have changed, 

many of the challenges remain the same: 

will technicians and practitioners accept 

the change and alter their behaviour? 

Can IT departments keep newly 

online assets safe from cybercrime? Is 

the infrastructure available for massive 

amounts of data? Do we have the skilled 

workers necessary to champion these 

tools and then pass their knowledge 

along to others? And finally – what do we 

even do with all this data? 

Finally, to add a bit of perspective, 

consider this: today’s college graduates 

were born after Amazon opened, eBay 

came online and Yahoo registered its 

domain name. They have largely grown 

up with technology – that’s a good thing. 

Those who go into engineering and 

maintenance will be comfortable using 

modern tools and techniques – and organizations 

must be prepared for a 

generation of labourers who expect the 

most up-to-date tools to be available. 

Ultrasound remote monitoring 

Ultrasound technology has emerged as 

an essential tool in its own right. It is 

AS TECHNOLOGIES LIKE REMOTE MONITORING EMERGE, 

THEY HAVE A POSITIVE NET EFFECT ON INDUSTRY. 

no longer simply a leak detector – it is a 

valuable technology that allows maintenance 

teams to identify mechanical 

faults earlier in the P-F Curve and even 

develop a more effective lubrication 

practice. 

Coupling remote monitoring with 

ultrasound could prove to be one of 

those paradigm-shifting developments. 

Ultrasound works best when you have 

as much sound information to work 

with as possible – that makes it easier 

to identify patterns, establish baselines 

and pinpoint inconsistencies. Moreover, 

as much as today’s maintenance technicians 

want to avoid reactive maintenance, 

there are certain assets that take 

priority over others. Anything that is 

closer to failure will earn more attention, 

meaning other assets could fly under the 

radar if they are assumed to be newer 

and in better shape. Remote monitoring 

can give technicians a way to keep an 

eye – or ear – on assets that aren’t being 

monitored. That is true for ultrasound 

monitoring on both mechanical and 

electrical assets. 

There are few limitations on the application 

for ultrasound remote monitoring. 

Any instance where maintenance 

professionals are collecting manual data 

through handheld devices might be an 

Ultrasonic Remote Access 

Sensors are permanently 

installed to continuously 

capture ultrasonic emissions 

from bearings 



Technological advancements make it now 

possible to check bearings’ sound recordings 

24/7, from any location 

opportunity to monitor remotely. In 

other cases, equipment that is difficult 

to access – dangerous, remote, isolated, 

or submerged – can receive the type of 

regular monitoring that extends useful 

life. Additionally, slow speed assets are 

great candidates for remote monitoring 

because it would otherwise require the 

maintenance technician to take a longer 

time to gather enough information 

manually. 

Beyond the advantages of larger data 

sets and remote collection, remote monitoring 

comes with an easy installation 

and the potential for a wireless setup. 

Compared to other systems, ultrasound 

remote monitoring is a cost-effective 

choice. 

Ultrasound use cases 

Let’s break down a few of the most common 

ways plant technicians utilize 

ultrasound maintenance to improve 

reliability: 

• Leak detection: Huge energy-saving 

(and therefore, money-saving) potential 

in compressed air and gas leaks, 

steam trap testing and valve testing. 

This is the most common application 

and it gives back the quickest return 

on investment. Some ultrasound tools 

can even be coupled with a free leakreporting 

app in iTunes and Google 

Play, like UE Systems’ Leak Survey 

app. 

• Electrical inspection: For corona, 

tracking and arcing, ultrasound usage 

is driven by safety, insurance agreements, 

standards and improved technology 

and software. Keep in mind 

here, that it is a good idea to use more 

than one technology to avoid missing 

potential problems, especially corona. 

• Condition monitoring: Bearings, 

rotating equipment, and conditionbased 

lubrication are all good candidates 

for regular remote ultrasound 

inspection. The best practice here is to 

establish a route, find baseline readings, 

determine trends and identify 

alarm levels. Ultrasound is particularly 

helpful with slow speed bearings. 

The 4Cast and Remote 

Access Sensors 

UE Systems’ remote monitoring tool, 

4Cast, interfaces with a bearing asset to 

continuously collect data and send an 

alert to the technician’s route-planning 

software if any alarm levels are surpassed. 

It works together with ultrasonic 

Remote Access Sensors (which can be 

very useful by themselves to inspect 

enclosed or hard-to-reach bearings) 

– the sensors, which are permanently 

mounted on the bearings, pick up the 

ultrasound emissions and send them to 

the 4Cast, which then sends that information 

to data management software 

in the form of decibel readings. The tool 

collects these readings from the sensors 

on a regular basis, but allows the user to 

specify how often to send information to 

the software. It will also send a sound file 

to the Spectralyzer (software for deep 

sound analysis) when necessary. 

With an available Ethernet connection, 

the 4Cast sends all its readings 

and recordings using the plant’s network, 

which brings obvious advantages: 

maintenance personnel will be able to 

access these readings and sound files 

ULTRASOUND TECHNOLOGY HAS EMERGED AS 

AN ESSENTIAL TOOL IN ITS OWN RIGHT. 

even outside of the plant’s network 

– thus allowing for true 24/7 remote 

monitoring. 

Today’s facilities should capitalize on 

the latest trend in reliable maintenance 

to ensure they get the most out of their 

assets. As technologies like remote monitoring 

emerge, they have a positive net 

effect on industry. Remote monitoring is 

the latest important plant maintenance 

technology, enhancing an already valuable 

tool and allowing plants to build a 

predictive maintenance culture. 


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Enabling 

Bigger 

Thinking 

New technologies such as artificial intelligence 

may seem exciting, but without consistent 

standardisation, problems will arise. 

STEFAN HOPPE, Global 

Vice President of OPC 

Foundation 

stefan.hoppe@ 

opcfoundation.org 

IF YOU ARE a regular reader of Maintworld, you 

will no doubt be familiar with many of the new 

technologies that are permeating the enterprise 

business world today. 

These technologies may seem somewhat glamorous, 

and can be used to help re-imagine the way 

we work, make decisions and collaborate. But in 

the same way you cannot build a house without 

solid foundations, it is important not to overlook 

the basic requirements for success. 

OPC Foundation is the organisation behind 

OPC Unified Architecture (OPC UA) – the standard 

for industrial interoperability between different 

vendors, different devices and different 

vertical markets today. OPC UA scales from the 

embedded world up to the cloud world, and Microsoft 

has not only deeply integrated this standard 

into the Azure cloud platform but also Mi- 


Source: ZVEI 

The Industrial Interoperability Standard 

www.opcfoundation.org 

OPC UA: Set for Industrie 4.0 

OPC UA is a framework for Industrial Interoperability 

➞ Modeling of data and interfaces for devices and services 

➞ Integrated security by design with confi gurable access rights for data and services – 

validated by German BSI security experts 

➞ Extendable transport protocols: Client/Server and Publisher/Subscriber and roadmap for TSN 

➞ Scalable from sensor to IT Enterprise & Cloud 

➞ Independent from vendor, operating system, implementation language and vertical markets 

Information models of different branches are mapped onto OPC UA to make them interoperable 

with integrated security. The OPC Foundation closely cooperates with organizations and 

associations from various branches: 

TM 

German and english version 

under opcfoundation.org/ 

resources/brochures/ 

OPC UA is secure 

Proved by experts 

opcfoundation.org/security 

VDMA-Guideline OPC UA 

ISBN 978-3-8163-0709-9 

OPC UA ist requirement 

in product-criteria catalogue 

No Industrie 4.0 without OPC UA 

UPDATE 

OPC Unified Architecture 

Interoperability for Industrie 4.0 and the Internet of Things 

1 

OPC UA Security Analysis 

24/01/2017 

NEW 

Industrie 4.0 Communication Guideline 

Based on OPC UA 

Industrie 4.0: 

Product criteria for 

Industrie 4.0 technologies 

Which properties does a product need in order to be Industrie 4.0 compatible? The Reference 

Architecture Model Industrie 4.0 and the Industrie 4.0 component provide a basic method and 

orientation. Nonetheless, answering this question has been difficult until now. Currently there 

are an immense number of terms and labels that appear to confirm the Industrie 4.0 or IoT 

capabilities of products. 

IoT 

4.0 

Industrie 

M2M 

Therefore, based on the Reference Architecture Model 

Industrie 4.0 (RAMI 4.0) and the Industrie 4.0 component, 

ZVEI is developing manufacturer-independent 

product criteria that will provide buyers with information 

regarding the Industrie 4.0 capabilities of products 

in the future. The product criteria are designed 

so that they not only provide an orientation aid for 

buyers, but will also become guidelines for manufacturers 

when developing future Industrie 4.0 product 

generations. They also highlight the need for research 

and standards. 

The Industrie 4.0 product criteria 

The criteria are based on RAMI 4.0 and in particular 

on the properties of the Industrie 4.0 component (see 

figure 1). They are divided into three categories that 

build on one another: Industrie 4.0 Basic, Industrie 

4.0 Ready and Industrie 4.0 Full. To be placed in one 

of these three categories, a product must fulfil all 

the properties of the category in question. The distinguishing 

features of the properties are the crossmanufacturer 

approach and service orientation. 

Figure 1: Product criteria are based on RAMI 4.0 and the Industrie 4.0 component 

in cooperation with 

Contact: 

Gunther Koschnick 

Managing Director 

Automation Division 

Phone: +49 69 6302-318 

E-mail: koschnick@zvei.org 

Version: April 2016 

Author: 

Martin Hankel, 

Bosch Rexroth 

Industrie 4.0 component RAMI 4.0 Criteria for Industrie 4.0 

Industrie 4.0 communication Architecture levels 

Standard functions 

Basic functions that are the same 

regardless of device 

Administration Shell 

Asset, 

e.g. machine 

Real Digital world 

Business 

Industrie 4.0 semantics 

A shared language 

Functional 

(vocabulary and sentence structure) 

Virtual description 

Industrie 4.0 services 

Information 

Industrie 4.0 communication 

Communication 

That can map new services 

Integration 

Identification 

Unique labeling of 

physical things and data 

Assets 

Security


crosoft is the world largest open source 

contributor to the OPC Foundation. 

One of the most exciting technologies 

to emerge in recent times is artificial 

intelligence (AI). AI requires data, and 

involves working with this data to gain 

insight. OPC UA acts as the interface to 

the data sources. 

In this scenario, OPC UA is the enabler. 

Think of a USB stick. The USB part 

is just the enabler, but the functionality 

of the device is beyond the USB part itself. 

The same stands for OPC UA: OPC 

UA is the enabler to move data left and 

right, but the true functionality of this 

data is the real value. USB is a physical 

connection between two devices – OPC 

UA is the ethernet connection between 

ethernet-connected devices. OPC UA 

delivers on top the meaning and description 

of data – the semantics, which is the 

real value to make use of the data. 

Artificial intelligence requires easy, 

fully standardised access to data sources 

– be it from robots or other machines – 

to let users take advantage of all that the 

technology has to offer. 

In the days of artificial intelligence, 

for human beings to understand how 

different machines worked, we had to 

know everything the big handbook told 

us about them. We needed to understand 

different IT protocols, and then 

understand how the robots work and the 

commands they would have to follow. 

All these descriptions were different for 

each vendor, providing a complicated 

challenge. 

In today’s world however, robots have 

interfaces that can be easily understood 

by human beings. Everybody should be 

able to easily understand these interfaces 

and interact with the robots thanks 

to standardisation. 

IT IS IMPORTANT NOT TO OVERLOOK THE BASIC 

REQUIREMENTS FOR SUCCESS. 

Let us look a little further afield. Technologies 

like voice recognition, speech 

machines and Microsoft HoloLens are 

helping companies re-imagine their 

processes today. But getting true insight 

from these technologies, or predicting 

when they may fail, is another step. 

Intelligent services can offer support 

here, but without the right levels and 

standards of connectivity, they cannot be 

utilised. 

It is obvious then that having standards 

in this area makes sense. ther is a 

push and pull in the market to agree on a 

specific standard that meets the requirements 

of Industry 4.0. 

But that is exactly what OPC UA offers 

right now. It is the mandatory required 

communication standard for Industry 

4.0. The VDAM, the largest European association 

of machine builders, including 

the biggest robotic associations, understood 

the need of standardised, fullysecured 

access to certain technologies, 

if artificial intelligence is to truly take 

off. Everybody then has the same understanding 

of the parameters at play. 

Do companies in the artificial intelligence 

space fully understand this need? 

That is debateable. I remember being 

quite shocked when I was sat in a room 

with 18 leaders in the robotics space at 

a recent event in Germany. They were 

talking about the parameters within 

which they operate, but there seemed 

to be different meanings in different 

companies. This complicates matters, 

and certainly does not make things easy 

for end users. This is why there are high 

engineering costs in plants to integrate 

these robots. The good news is that they 

are standardizing semantic now, agreeing 

on the same interfaces for data and 

services based on OPC UA! The results 

will be available mid next year at the Automatica 

conference. Is your robotic supplier 

supporting this initiative? Ask them 

if it allows the connection of your robot, 

within 20 minutes, to general IT Enterprise 

and Azure cloud solutions. 


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Effective 

Backlog 

Management – 

Part 2 

Backlog management has a number of different but interdependent focuses: Backlog 

Work Order Quality, Age of Backlog and Backlog Size Management. This article 

will focus on Age of Backlog, while the next edition of Maintworld-magazine will 

cover Backlog Size Management in more detail. 

STEVE GILES, 

Marshall Institute, 

sgiles@ 

marshallinstitute.com 


THE MAINTENANCE BACKLOG can have 

many different stages. A generic view 

includes four main stages or queues: 

• Awaiting Planning – newly converted 

work requests awaiting the planning 

process 

• In Planning – work orders the planner 

is actively planning 

• Awaiting Materials or Services – 

planned and estimated work orders 

awaiting delivery of special ordered 

materials or for a specialty contractor 

to commit to a requested time of 

execution 

• Ready to Schedule – work orders that 

are fully planned with all materials 

on the site and any contract or 

services needed to commit to the 

required timing 

The timely progress of work orders 

through the different the backlog stages 

must be monitored regularly. As he performs 

his daily actives, the planner will 

review the work orders in each stage. If 

he finds work orders that are not progressing, 

he should address the reason. 

There should also be a more formal 

review (monthly) to identify and resolve 

any slow or overdue work orders. 

This review needs to be attended by 

the main stakeholders – Maintenance 

supervision and Operations supervision 

with the ability to make decisions 

needed to resolve any issues. 

I have experienced many different 

backlog management processes:most 

were ineffective in actually managing 

the backlog. The factors that create 

these different approaches lie in management’s 

view of the purpose of the 

backlog. Some management teams 

hold a negative view of the work order 

backlog. This is many times the result 

of a highly reactive maintenance environment. 

This approach to backlog 

management will usually result in 

reviewing the entire backlog sorted by 

age. If the right personnel are in attendance, 

some progress can be made, but it 

will be frustrating, slow, and painful. 

Systems like this do not understand 

or appreciate the most important purpose 

of a maintenance backlog: providing 

time for the planner to actually plan 

the work. 

As a business develops a more effective 

Work Management Process, 

the understanding and appreciation 

of work orders moving through the 

backlog grows. Improvement across 

a number of measures of the maintenance 

programs will clearly be visible. 

The credibility of the work management 

process and the planning and 

scheduling process specifically will be 

growing. 

This management process consists 

of reviewing only those work orders 

that are overdue or in danger of going 

overdue. Overdue status is determined 

by the target date for executing the 

work order. A work order system that 

uses work order targets by execution 

week provides a much cleaner means 

to determine if a work order is overdue. 

Work order systems that use a window 

of execution based on priority are a little 

less clear on when to classify a work 

order as overdue or in danger of being 

overdue. But in either case, the process 

focuses on that subset of work orders 

that are not progressing through the 

backlog stages as expected. 

By only dealing with this subset of 

work orders, the meeting can be kept to 

a reasonable length. 

Of course, it is also important that 

the overdue list be distributed prior to 

the meeting, so the attendees can investigate 

and be in a position to make a 

decision during the meeting.

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Figure 1. 

Standard: 

Daily Work 

Request 

Review 

Meeting 

Unplanned 

Work Orders 

Planning Process 

Work Orders 

Planning 

Figure 1. illustrates the journey each 

work order must complete before it can 

be placed on the schedule. Again, if the 

work order is progressing through the 

backlog stages as expected – leave it 

alone and let the system work. If conditions 

have changed, move it to an urgent 

or emergency work order that will be 

removed from the backlog and executed 

by the Maintenance supervisor. 

The only work orders that should be 

reviewed are those overdue or soon to 

be overdue. If the work order process is 

performing well, this subset should be 

~10% of the total backlog. If the work order 

process is still a work in progress, the 

percent may be higher, but it will still be 

a subset of the total backlog. 

Once this subset of the backlog is determined, 

each work order is processed 

through a series of questions, in search 

of the underlying reasons for its being 

overdue. 

Backlog Meeting Process Flow 

The questions should review these aspects 

of the work order: 

• Work orderhas been completed 

either as part of another work order 

or on an urgent or emergency basis, 

orng work ordermay not have been 

Awaiting 

Materials or 

Services 

External Services 

Procurement 

Ready to 

schedule 

Overdue or Soon to be Overdue Work Orders 

Standard: 

Schedule 

marked as complete (by oversight) 

• Work order without a clear business 

purpose and should be considered 

invalidate 

• ork orders for the same task, but 

with differently worded titles or 

problem descriptions may actually 

be duplicates 

• Work order with an incorrect 

priority:priority of a work order can 

change over time and require an adjustment 

(i.e. A minor leak that has 

increased in size) 

• Work order with overdue material 

needs. Work orders that require specially 

ordered material , when the 

expected delivery date is overdue or 

close to being overdue 

• Work order requiring contract 

resources should be reviewed to ensure 

the contractor is committed to 

the required timing 

• Work orderincorrectly flagged originally: 

a task that must be done during 

a shutdown or turnaround 

It is important that the list of work orders 

to be reviewed is distributed to the 

meeting attendees prior to the meeting, 

giving the attendees time to adequately 

investigate the reasons for work order 

tardiness. Failure to take this step will 

result in an inefficient meeting, and over 

time, reduce attendance. 

Attendees should include Operations 

or Production management, Maintenance 

management and any other organization 

that has a work order being 

considered. 

As the overdue list is processed, the 

reason for a work order being overdue 

is determined and an action item developed 

for the appropriate party to address 

at an agreed upontime. 

This review should include all work 

that is to be done by site maintenance or 

a supplemental or specialty contractor. 

I have reviewed backlogs with work 

orders 18 to 48 months old. While there 

may be reasons for a work order staying 

in backlog that long (requiring a shutdown 

or turnaround) many aree simple 

tasks that struggled, competing with 

new work for resources. Any work order 

that has been passed over for 12 months 

or longer should really be objectively 

reviewed for canceling. If it hasn’t been 

seen as important for an extended period 

of time, why spend the resources to 

do it? 

The bottom line for addressing a 

slow progressing work order is to build 

credibility for the work order system – 

remove the negative stigma of being in 

backlog. As credibility grows, use of the 

process will also grow, and attempts to 

beat the system by assigning an incorrect 

priority to tasks will be fewer. 

Credibility of the Planning and 

Scheduling process is critical to achieving 

any degree of success in implementing 

a Work Management Process. 

Part 3 of this article will focus on 

Backlog Size Management. 

1.3 Standard: Backlog Management 

Before Meetng 

During Meetng 

Afer Meetng 

Maintenance Planner / 

Sc hed ul e r 

[1.3.1] Run Backlog 

Report 

[1.3.2] Review 

Backlog and 

Resource 

Requirements 

[1.3.20] Update 

CMMS 

[1.3.19] Publish 

Meetng 

Results/Minutes 

Cross Functonal 

[1.3.3] Stll 

Valid? 

No 

[1.3.4] Mark 

Cancelled 

Yes 

[1.3.5] 

Duplicate? 

Yes 

[1.3.6] Mark 

Cancelled 

No 

[1.3.7] Is 

Priority 

Correct? 

No 

[1.3.8] Correct 

Priority 

Yes 

[1.3.10] 

Stores Item 

Availability 

Issues? 

Yes 

[1.3.11] Is 

Expeditng 

Appropriate? 

No 

No 

[1.3.13] 

Requires 

Outage? 

Yes 

[1.3.14] Assign 

to Outage 

Planning 

No 

[1.3.15] 

Work Order 

Planned? 

No 

[1.3.16] Ensure 

Work Order is 

Assigned to 

Planner 

Yes 

[1.3.17] Review 

Remaining 

Man-Hour 

Requirements 

[1.3.18] Follow 

Up on Open 

Issues 

Yes 

S t or e ro o m 

Accoi ca te 

[1.3.12] 

Expedite 

Materials 

P r o d u c t o n 

Team Lead / 

Ma n a g e r 

[1.3.9] Notfy 

Requestor of 

Changes to 

Work Order 


What does 

What does 

DOWNTIME 

What does 

DOWNTIME 

DOWNTIME 

mean to you? 

mean to you? 

mean to you? 

The Uptimization Experts. 

The Uptimization Experts. 



marshallinstitute.com

LEADERSHIP 


LEADERSHIP 

MAINTENANCE DEBT 

Dictates Your 

Maintenance Cost 

Most maintenance managers feel the pressure of lowering maintenance costs and at 

the same time improving reliability. As you know, annual maintenance costs have a 

strong correlation as to how well basic work processes such as planning, scheduling, 

and preventative maintenance are executed in our mills, mines and factories. 

TORBJÖRN 

IDHAMMAR,, 

President of IDCON INC 

in Raleigh NC, USA, 

www.idcon.com 

ANOTHER FACTOR that heavily influences 

maintenance costs is your existing 

“maintenance debt”. IDCON’s definition 

of maintenance debt is the total cost of 

repairing all equipment in need of repair. 

This equation does not include improvements, 

only the costs for repair of existing 

equipment problems. It is important 

to remember that the maintenance debt 

is the sum of all repairs, because a valid 

maintenance repair job can never be 

avoided, only delayed. If you think about 

that statement, and find it to be true, you 

will also arrive to the conclusion that you 

have to pay the maintenance debt, there 

is no other alternative. 

A VALID REPAIR CAN 

NEVER BE AVOIDED, 

ONLY DELAYED. 

Imagine two identical organizations: 

”Efficient Plant” and ”Chaotic Plant”. 

For the past 10 years, “Efficient” has 

kept up, and continuously improved its 

preventive maintenance (PM), planning 

and scheduling and other key work processes. 

Thanks to this dedication they 

have maximized their resources and 

effectively managed their maintenance 

budget; retaining a maintenance debt of 

$300,000. Chaotic, on the other hand, 

has spent the last 10 years working reactively, 

leaving them unable to keep up 

with repairs. They are falling behind and 

need to spend $5 million to make all necessary 

repairs. The annual maintenance 

budgets for both plants are identical, and 

they have the same resources and staff 

size. The reliability is at 90% for Efficient 

Plant and 75% for Chaotic Plant 

and each plant currently has about 100 

craftspeople. 

A fairly typical reaction for many 

companies in Chaotic’s situation is to 

reduce the maintenance budget in an 

effort to minimize the expenses and 

through this effort show better results 

(theoretically). The problem? The anticipated 

results will only last for a very 

short time. An industrial organization 

can never avoid a valid repair work order. 

Sooner or later the repairs have to be 

done. On top of this, 99.9% of the time, 

it is more cost effective to repair sooner 

rather than later, often by a ration 1:3 

-1:9. 

Putting a Price Tag on Chaos 

So, what is the price tag for Chaotic to 

reach the same reliability as Efficient? It 

will cost roughly $4.7million (The difference 

in maintenance debt between the 

plants) in maintenance hours and material. 

But, for the theory to work in the 

long term, they also have to implement 

efficient work processes to be able to 

maintain that level of reliability. 

If we assume that 30% of Chaotic’s 

maintenance debt ($1.5 M) is material, 

and one maintenance hour costs about 

60 dollars, the total cost to get to Efficient’s 

reliability will be 58,333 maintenance 

hours + $1.5 million in materials. 

Breaking it down further: 31 full-time 

employees working a full year (58,333 

hours and 1,880hrs/worker/year) + material. 

Alternatively, the repairs can be done 

over a longer period of time since it may 

be hard to plan and schedule for that 

number of people in one year, there is a 

training period, and other factors that 

play a role. One could, for example, add 

10 additional people for 3 years. If Chaotic 

gets its PM, planning and scheduling 

implemented in the plant, the additional 

people will be a temporary need. A 

good idea may be to match the incoming 

“temporary addition” with natural attrition 

in the work force, in order to keep a 

trained work force in place? 

Understanding the Cost of 

Maintenance is Crucial 

We have an upcoming job with a large 

corporation, where the maintenance 

debt plays a key role. Two of their plants 

have $45/unit higher maintenance 

cost than the other. IDCON’s task is to 

analyze why. It is an interesting project 

and we need to understand how mainte- 



nance is run, how finances are reported, 

and the history of these plants. 

It is important for the project to understand 

what it costs, and how much 

time is needed in order to improve the 

reliability. We inspected a portion of 

the equipment with knowledgeable inhouse 

personnel and analyzed the backlog 

with each maintenance department 

and came up with an estimated value 

of the current maintenance debt. It is a 

rough estimate, based on a few sample 

areas. While an exact sum would be 

great to have, the most important thing 

is to initially identify whether the debt 

is small, medium, or large. The project 

approach we used can be summarized 

as follows: 

1. A work process study to deem 

whether existing preventative 

maintenance, priorities, planning, 

scheduling, and basic 

material management work processes 

effect the maintenance 

cost. 

2. Comparing maintenance costs 

with another successful plant in 

order to get a feel for bookkeeping 

practices. Verify that similar 

items are included in the maintenance 

cost when we compare 

plants. 

can tell it will take 2-2.5 years to manage 

all the valid repairs needed with an 

additional 15-25 people, assuming all 

craftspeople work 1,880 hours per year. 

MAINTENANCE DEBT IS THE SUM OF ALL REPAIRS, 

BECAUSE A VALID MAINTENANCE REPAIR JOB CAN 

NEVER BE AVOIDED, ONLY DELAYED. 

Millions 

12 

10 

8 

6 

4 

2 

Two similar plants - Different History 

0 

Chaotic Plant 

Efficient Plant 

Maintenance Debt Annual Maintenance Budget 

Table 1: It will cost Chaotic Plant $4.7 

Million including and 31 additional 

craftspeople for a years and 1.41 Million 

in materials to catch up with Efficient 

Plant’s results. The theory only works if 

Chaotic Plant’s manages to perform as well 

as Efficient in the future with regards to 

planning, scheduling, PM and other basic 

work processes. 

Table 2: Three plants of similar size 

and maintenance budget have different 

maintenance debt. The maintenance debts 

are causing plant 1 & 2 to over run their 

maintenance budget every year. 

3. Trying to identify the size of the 

”maintenance debt.” 

4. Collectively documenting a plan, 

in order to improve the situation. 

5. Implementation. 

6. Follow up. 

At our initial audit for our client, we 

estimated the maintenance debt to be 

$3.5 million, which includes 40,833 

work hours in one plant, and $4.2 million 

and 49,000 work hours in the other. 

At a third plant, which has much better 

reliability and lower maintenance cost 

than the other two, the maintenance 

debt was only $1/4 million with 4,700 

work hours. 

All three plants are about the same 

size, with around 110 maintenance employees. 

In the two problem-plants, we 

From Analysis to 

Implementation Plan 

After this analysis, we created an implementation 

plan with each plant, and 

reached the typical conclusions for reliability 

improvement projects. In order 

to effectively reduce a maintenance 

debt, the plants need to validate all work 

requests and prioritize, plan and schedule, 

every validated work order. They 

also have to make sure preventive maintenance 

and condition monitoring is in 

place in order to minimize and identify 

potential new problems or breakdowns. 

The added benefit of adding an 

analysis of the maintenance debt is that 

you get approximate figures of work 

hours and costs needed to improve the 

situation. 

The most important piece of the 

puzzle is that corporate management 

accepts the identified repairs that have 

to be dealt with before reliability can be 

expected to improve significantly. They 

have created a 3-year plan including 

an additional expense budget (around 

2 million / year/ plant) for the maintenance 

debt. Both plant and corporate 

leadership understand that the biggest 

risk factor for success is to get personnel 

in the plant implementing the 

basic work processes. But, with strong 

leadership and some patience, I am 

convinced they will succeed with this 

sensible approach. 

This corporation’s situation with 

struggling plants, could describe most of 

the clients IDCON works with. The only 

difference is the size of the maintenance 

debt. The size of the maintenance debt 

is oftentimes directly related to how 

well PM and planning and scheduling 

has been carried out in past years. I 

hope these thoughts and examples can 

help you get a grip on maintenance debt, 

to improve reliability in your mine, 

plant or mill. 

Table 3: An estimate of the number of 

work hours that is needed to eliminate the 

maintenance debt in each plant. 

Figure 4: Plant Chaotic needs 31 effort 

years to reduce the maintenance debt. 

They decided to use 10 additional people 

over 3 years. An idea is to add 15 people 

to the regular workforce and let attrition 

reduce the workforce back to 100 over 3 

years. 


INNOVATION 

Open Innovation 

Models Help Companies 

Disrupt Their Own Business 

Even in traditional industrial companies, 

the pressure to renew their business is growing as 

software moves into the very core of the business in every industry. To shield 

themselves from disruption, more and more companies are looking at open innovation 

models – in other words, they strive to create partnerships with outside 

players via hackathons, startup investments or other avenues. 


LEADERSHIP 

ANNI HARJU, 

Principal, Futurice 

&startups 

anni.harju 

@futurice.com 

Photos: Gökçen Keskin, Jussi Heltttunen 

AS SOFTWARE BECOMES more integral 

to all business, digital disruption has a 

significant impact on even the most traditional 

industries. There are plenty of 

good and bad examples of how to try and 

secure the future of your business. Rolls 

Royce is a good one - instead of just selling 

jet engines, they have developed their 

service portfolio and business model to 

rely primarily on selling lifecycle services 

using sensors and the Internet of Things. 

According to an international survey 

produced by KPMG*, 65 percent of 

CEOs are afraid that newcomers will 

disrupt their company’s business model. 

Over half feel that they don’t do enough 

to disrupt their own business models. 

The global startup scene is buzzing 

and CEOs in all industries all over the 

world are waking up to the need to renew 

their business. Now is the right time to 

invest in it, too. Statistically, startups are 

far less likely to succeed (0,002%) compared 

to projects by companies building 

new business on their established 

strengths (12,5%). ** 

Which begs the question: What is 

keeping large corporations from developing 

new business models? 

It is not a question of will. According 

the to the aforementioned survey by KP- 

MG, the three central strategic priorities 

for companies are developing innovation 

activities (21%), improving customercenteredness 

(19%) and implementing 

disruptive (18%). 

How to Facilitate Innovation 

Based on our experience, innovation 

activities often meet one of the following 

obstacles: 

1. A company needs a culture that 

supports innovation, which, in 

turn, requires measuring the right 

things and operating at a higher 

clock speed than is customary for 

your average industrial company. 

Innovations are not born in the 

boardroom or the corner office. 

The whole organization has to be 

lean enough to create the company’s 

next success story. 

2. Traditional governance and decision-making 

processes do not support 

the development of disruptive 

business where the added value experienced 

by the customer may be 

a better indicator of potential business 

value than revenue streams. 

3. Business renewal is overly conservative, 

especially early on – investments 

are insufficient and failures 

frowned upon, which tends to 

dampen the desire to experiment 

and innovate. Typically, companies 

also look too close to home for 

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INNOVATION 

ADVERTORIAL 

their benchmarks. In a digitalization 

survey Futurice carried out 

on large Finnish corporations, 

almost all respondents mentioned 

only other Finnish companies as 

their competitors. *** 

Open innovation processes that utilize 

players from outside the organization 

are one way to sidestep these issues. 

When an outside stakeholder becomes 

a part of a company’s business development 

activities, the organisation 

is forced to let go of their old thought 

models and change is accelerated. 

Open innovation models can be 

utilised in renewing business on three 

levels: 

Try Out Openness by Running 

a Hackathon 

Organising hackathons with outside 

partners are frequently the first step 

companies take towards using open 

innovation models. A hackathon is an 

intensive, typically two-day event during 

which a group of people get together 

to solve problems. Often they involve 

designing and maybe even building 

software or apps. Hackathons are a good 

way to introduce an organisation to the 

concept of venturing outside to look 

for ideas, but if the organisation has not 

changed enough to exploit the nascent 

business models created during the 

event, the impact hackathons can have 

will be very limited. The question to ask 

when organising a hackathon is: What 

do we want to happen in the one to six 

months following the hackathon? What 

about on the next working day? What 

will be different? 

This requires a larger and more clearly 

defined budget, but because business 

development takes place outside of organisational 

boundaries, the pressure to 

change the company’s decision-making 

or budgeting processes is weaker. As 

approaches go, this is still fairly light, 

but it also means that some of the immaterial 

capital of an industry leader, 

such as customer networks and domain 

expertise, remains partially or even fully 

unexploited. 

Find Suitable Partners and Create Your 

Own Ecosystem 

The best thing to do is to build an open 

innovation model that efficiently exploits 

fresh thinking and expertise 

found outside the company and combines 

it with the company’s ability to 

utilise industry networks and other 

immaterial capital gained over the 

years. This way an outside party can use 

their expertise to fill needs like building 

digital or data-based business models. 

Furthermore, in a larger company the 

outside partner can drive projects in a 

way that prevents the development of 

nascent business from being left in the 

shadow of the established ways of doing 

things. 

The Future Belongs to 

Ecosystems 

In the future, even larger companies will 

have to rely on a combination of agility 

and versatility to survive. Ecosystems 

are a better way of ensuring access to a 

variety of expertise and resources than 

large investments in areas that are too 

far removed from the company’s core 

competence. They offer visibility far beyond 

one’s own domain and function as 

a platform for brave experiments. 

The way Futurice’s new initiative, Futurce 

&startups works is predicated on 

the idea that the most effective business 

innovations of the future are created by 

combining organisational interfaces. In 

our case, our partners bring to the table 

their deep domain expertise, and we 

bring our 17 years’ worth of experience 

in software development, digital business 

models and service design. Becoming 

an equal partner, instead of a vendor, 

in selected projects is a big change for 

Futurice and a major opportunity for 

our clients. 

Fortum is a company that has been 

actively looking for new value chains 

and business models in the field of energy. 

In a world where more and more 

people can make the change from producing 

and consuming clean energy, 

energy companies need to find new 

revenue models and new markets. In 

India, Fortum and Futurice &startups 

are looking at new ways of delivering solar 

energy in areas without dependable 

grids – or grids, period – using digital 

technology. Instead of selling energy, 

the new business model being developed 

offers local producers a platform 

they can use to sell their solar energy. 

There’s a potentially huge demand for 

platforms like this in the developing 

world, where lack of access to energy 

has been a hindrance to development 

and established ways of producing energy 

can be very polluting. 

Guard Your Back by Investing 

in a Startup 

Another way to protect your company 

from a potential disruption is to invest 

in startups – directly or through funds. 

Source 1*: https://home.kpmg.com/xx/en/home/media/press-releases/2016/06/2016- 

ceo-outlook-next-3-years-more-critical-than-previous-50.html 

Source 2**: https://hbr.org/2016/12/when-large-companies-are-better-atentrepreneurship-than-startups 

Source 3***: Futurice digitalisation survey 2015 


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tel.: +420 596 232 670 

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P R O V E N Q U A L I T Y 

QUALITY MEANS TO US: 

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INNOVATION MADE IN GERMANY. 

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PRÜFTECHNIK Dieter Busch AG 

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Tel.: +49 89 99616-0 

info@pruftechnik.com 

pruftechnik.com

Maintworld 4/2017

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