Separator Fan Cleaning Prevents $120k in Lost Production and Repair Costs for Cement Plant
The Challenge
A global cement manufacturer needed an affordable wireless predictive maintenance solution to monitor their tier-II critical machine assets at their flagship North American plant. Wired solutions were too expensive and route-based solutions were not feasible on most of these assets. They chose the Vero® wireless predictive maintenance solution and were rewarded with a 57X ROI after the first six months. Now Vero® is preventing unplanned downtime and increasing productivity at six of their plants.
Creating Value, Resolving Issues
The AssetWatch® Condition Monitoring Engineer (CME) dedicated to monitoring the machine assets at a flagship cement plant alerted customer of a separator fan issue on their most profitable line, noting increased vibration at the turning speed of the fan in the horizontal and axial directions. Additionally, non-synchronous vibration was noted on the fan motor DE bearing.
Customer was notified to check the fan for material build up suspected of causing the imbalance, and to inspect the inner raceway of the fan DE bearing for damage.
Vibration dropped significantly after cleaning and the early alert on the bearing fault provided the customer the luxury of having several months to schedule the bearing replacement before failure.
The customer estimated that the fan cleaning and subsequent early bearing replacement prevented $120,000 in lost production and repair costs. Below are the key metrics from just the initial six-month service.
Corporate Maintenance Manager
Rapid Enterprise Expansion
Immediately following the successful six-month paid trial at their flagship North American cement plant, this global cement manufacturer quickly expanded Vero® into five additional plants. AssetWatch® CMEs with the help of ML are now monitoring 900 sensors and preventing unplanned downtime at six facilities with total customer savings now exceeding $2M.
AssetWatch partnered with AWS to provide the scalability and reliability needed to support a serverless architecture. With a robust suite of services tailored for data ingestion, processing, and machine learning, AWS enables AssetWatch to seamlessly scale sensor data and deliver predictive insights to manufacturing companies. AWS infrastructure reduces operational overhead and allows AssetWatch to focus on innovation to drive value to our customers. Additionally, AWS’s strong security framework and global infrastructure ensure the resilience and compliance required to support mission-critical manufacturing operations at scale. This partnership positions AssetWatch to accelerate growth while maintaining the highest levels of performance and reliability.
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One Sensor Saved a Potential $120k in Lost Gross Margin!
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