For plant personnel, keeping production running is an everyday task, as is looking for ways to improve performance. But is your maintenance strategy up to this availability and performance challenge?
According to the 2018 Maintenance Survey by Plant Engineering magazine, cutting downtime remains one of the top goals of plant managers. Unplanned shutdowns are unacceptable; the costs of failure too high. But every now and then, something breaks down.
Valve reliability
Valves are key elements in controlling production. Their value cannot be underestimated as they directly control the process and impact on its efficiency. If left untended, valves can deteriorate, fail and put your entire operation at risk.
Even reliable valves can fail when a production facility undergoes changes without taking the valve fleet into account. Well-intentioned modifications can disharmonize your original valve design. As a result, you end up with valves of improper type, size or material, putting production on hold.
Get to know your valve installed base
When you understand the impact of valves on your process, you gain an opportunity to improve performance. For maintenance optimization, getting to know the actual condition of your valve installed base is key – whether any failure is approaching, and what should be done to prevent or address a problem quickly at reasonable cost.
When it comes to valve condition analysis, we often meet plant maintenance and production teams who lack either training in valves or experience in analysis, or simply don’t know where to start. In these cases, expert help is best.
Expert help, excellent results
Engaging experienced experts to fill the gaps where you’re missing in-house resources is a good way to reach your performance goals. This is where we come into the picture − to help you learn to listen to your valves. Once we understand your targets and concerns, we can design the best approach to support you.
We share our extensive experience so that you can better understand your valve installed base – to see its possibilities, how much all the details matter, to help analyze device condition and behavior, and to identify the correct maintenance schedule for each valve. We work with you to fill your stock with the required spare parts, help repair everything that has failed, find and prevent root causes. By taking a holistic overview, your process performance can rise to an entirely new level of efficiency and predictability.
More than a supplier
Customers are often surprised to discover that Neles is more than just a reliable product and parts supplier. We provide a range of additional support that covers all possible ways to improve a plant’s performance.
So, the next time you might need some extra maintenance support, valve know-how or parts resources, we are here to focus on your goals.
Text originally published in 2018, and slightly updated in April 2022, due to the company name change to Valmet.
