Pratik Soni

March 25, 2013 2 minute read

Predictive Equipment Maintenance in Mining Industries

Introduction

This document discuss the use case of SAP HANA combined with SAP Visual enterprise to control Maintenance cost of a Mining Companies.

Why it is necessary to control Maintenance Cost?

Mining is a capital intensive industry. As an average, capital costs represent more than 40 per cent of total mining costs. Cutting cost through an optimized used of this fixed capital is definitely easier than optimizing the efficiency of labor.

The ultimate objective of the maintenance function is to provide competitive advantage by increasing the efficiency of maintenance actions and increasing reliability and availability of equipment through effective strategies, planning and continuous improvement. High levels of equipment reliability and availability improve product quality and delivery performance, reduce asset intensity, and also reduce direct operational and maintenance costs.

To achieve excellence in maintenance requires the following:

Maintenance goals and objectives set to suit the business
A strategy to achieve those goals and objectives
A system to measure and manage the maintenance function
The right resources

(See the attached file)

What is Predictive Maintenance?

Predictive maintenance is a holistic way of maintenance of all the assets. It helps to determine the condition of all available equipment in order to predict when maintenance should be performed. This approach offers cost savings over routine or time-based preventive maintenance, because tasks are performed only when warranted.

The main value of Predicted Maintenance is to allow convenient scheduling of corrective maintenance, and to prevent unexpected equipment failures. The key is “the right information in the right time”. By knowing which equipment needs maintenance, maintenance work can be better planned (spare parts, people etc.) and what would have been “unplanned stops” are transformed to shorter and fewer “planned stops”, thus increasing plant availability. Other advantages include increased equipment lifetime, increased plant safety, fewer accidents with negative impact on environment, and optimised spare parts handling.

Why HANA?

Despite of collecting rich data, decision-making frequently remains reactive rather than predictive. Many mining companies still have only limited visibility into key performance metrics and struggle to track indicators such as mine contractor activity, costs associated with operations and maintenance and ore movements at different stages of the production cycle.

With SAP HANA, It will be possible to push data from operational systems like SCADA, PLM etc into the HANA database, and perform real-time analysis to detect and trigger repair or schedule maintenance. This will benefit in following ways:

Reduction of maintenance costs due to predictive analysis capabilities ensures that maintenance is only performed when warranted
Increased Operational efficiency due to increased equipment availability thereby reduction in Cost of production.
Increase in Planned Maintenance will improve production planning and provide better control over Cash Flow.

How SAP Visual Enterprise can be used in Predictive Maintenance?

SAP Visual Enterprise Viewer works in 3D with SAP Visual Enterprise you could use the capabilities to see 3D data in a dashboard for supply chain analysis, engineering performance, and factory workflows.

Combined with SAP HANA it allows you to better view of your analytics data by allowing 3D view of your equipment so that it will be possible to understand you data more meaningful analysis of your data. (Please visit you tube video link reference point no 4 for a demo on how it works)

References:

To know more about SAP HANA visit following link

To Know more about SAP Visual Enterprise visit following link:

Please Note:-

Although I have tried to verify all the correctness of contents given in this document.Please let me know if there is any errors or misstatements or any exaggeration from my side regarding SAP HANA or SAP visual Enterprise or otherwise.Any suggestions on how can i improve this article are warmly welcomed.

3 Comments

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SUPRIYO SENGUPTA

May 7, 2013 at 12:22 pm

Nice to read.

This will bring some more sophistication into the mining industry.

One point - in the attached diagram, Idle Time can not be made as Zero in any condition. When multiple HEMMs will be in operation at a time, at least one of them will be having idle time in all theoretical or practical conditions. So the target for Idle Time handling is always - to optimize or to minimize. But not zero

It is really great to see the youtube demo on SAP visual enterprising. But does it actually add any special value other than graphical representation. For the equipment's part number or equipment number, SAP Hana uses analytics and recommended a maintenance (the predicting one). This recommendation will have the part or equipment number. Isn't it enough for actual maintenance work ? Or do we need SAP Visual Enterprise for showing the part as well to the maintenance team !

Thirdly, all these application is possible only when Machine / Equipment sends data. Now a days, most of the equipments come with in-built application for data inflow / outflow etc. So does SAP plan to partner with some of those application provider to build a complete solution?

Pratik Soni

Blog Post Author

May 8, 2013 at 8:36 am

Hi Supriyo,

Thank you for pointing that out.

I totally agree with you that idle time cannot be made zero.However it can be optimised.

Regarding your question on visual enterprise.Sap Visual Enterprise can:

Provides a visual context to the data you are analyzing just like you can get better insight of your Sales analysis by region by seeing a graph or map showing sales details by region.This is necessary in Mining Plant and Equipment because you have to deal with millions of parts and accessories which requires maintenance (and visual context make understandable to non technical users also..) further you can identify critical parts in advance which might lead to equipment stoppage or heave damage to the equipment as a whole.

Simplifies your MRO procedures. By attaching the visual picture to the maintenance work order it will save time used in equipment inspection.Please visit below link

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HX8muXmAm90&list=FLpxR3qiMwgQCS84-XAMWM4A&index=9

Regarding your question on SAP partnership with application provider i have found one SAP Partner which provides solution for Transportation MRO named Enigma but i am not sure whether this would help or not. Please find the link below for information on it

http://www.enigma.com/partners/sap.cfm

Below is a link of SAP partner members of the Industry Value Network group for mining which might provide the solution for this.

http://www.sap.com/communities/ivn/mining/eam.epx

Hope this all helps

Thanks,

Pratik

SUPRIYO SENGUPTA

May 8, 2013 at 3:45 pm

Hi Pratik,

Great information.

I highly appreciate your detail study regarding this.

Yes, you are correct. Visual context will be always double effective for a anyone to take action. No doubt on that. Even I would like to see a 3D visual information regarding what to be worked and where to work. In this context, integration with SAP Visual Enterprise will be very much effective.

I am waiting to see a case study of real time implementation for any mining client of this combo - SAP ECC + SAP HANA + SAP Visual Enterprise + Some Data transferring application from HEMM (like Enigma)

The link about enigma was very useful.

Though, it is not clearly mentioned that they have proven application for mining industry. But I saw their industry segment and found that Heavy Equipment is one of their industrial working area. May be, rather than a mining organization, the OEMs are more linked with this Enigma. They must be using this application into their HEMMs. Need to explore more on this

Sad to see that on mining front, SAP does not have much partners. 🙁 only two !!! 🙁 ... may be in future, there will be more. I though does not have much knowledge about the application of any product / solution from the partnership of those mining partners with SAP.

But thanks anyway for all your useful information.

Will keep in touch 🙂

Regards,

Supriyo

Predictive Equipment Maintenance in Mining Industries

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