July-August 2021

10 | Plant & Works Engineering www.pwemag.co.uk July/August 2021 Insight M aintenance 4.0 is a machine- assisted digital form of all the things we have being doing for the past 40 years to ensure our assets deliver value for our organisations. Maintenance 4.0 includes a holistic view of sources of data, ways to connect it, ways to collect it, and ways to analyse it. We lined up four excellent speakers for this event, an international panel representing views in four different countries. Christopher Hallum, Regional Sales Manager UK & Ireland, UE Systems, based in Lincolnshire, UK Pete Sopcik, Marketing Manager, OtoSense Business Unit, Analog Devices, speaking from Boston, USA Daniel Fern, UK Country Manager, IXON Cloud, speaking from the Netherlands Michael LeFeuvre, Regional Product Manager, Red Lion Controls, speaking from France. We identified the following themes that we wanted to cover: The Maintenance Industry “Megatrends” Have CoVID-19 and the skills gap accelerated adoption of AI and industrial Collating Data from Multiple Sources (Lead - Chris Hallum) Easy wins with Maintenance 4.0 Maintenance industry/ megatrends Pete Sopcik, marketing manager for the Otosense business unit at Analogue Devices, set the scene for the day by expanding on the key drivers, or “Megatrends” influencing the maintenance sector. The team is focused more on providing analytics, that compliment a lot of the measurement technologies that Analogue Devices is traditionally providing to a broad range of customers across industrial automation, aerospace communications and other critical industries. “We’ve seen a number of trends that are that are accelerating the need for new ways of performing maintenance, said Pete Sopcik. “On top of that, loss of skills, retiring workforces, COVID, are together creating quite an opportunity, positive or negative depending on how you want to look at it. “We’ve been focused on for some time providing measurement technologies to customers that allow the measurement of critical machines, critical sensing inputs, and using that data to create new insights into the equipment during its operation. This means being able to convert that data into digital data, interpret it and then take that information and feed it back into systems. We see a tremendous opportunity in industrial automation generally and specifically to maintenance. “The technologies have improved significantly enough to enable new ways of collecting data to improve the quality of the data that’s being collected. This makes it possible to understand how instruments and machines interact with each other and with the rest of the environment in which it resides. “You want to extract as much benefit from these machines as possible. So having that visibility into all the equipment in sync, provides that type of insight. COVID has really accelerated the amount of adoption here for new ways of performing maintenance, new ways of automating a lot of the capabilities in the industrial environment. It has limited the access that we have to these facilities by not being able to have people on site. So not only can we have, not only is it difficult for us to access our own facilities, but to allow third parties and other service providers to get access to it. “And then on top of all that, we’ve had for some time a skills gap that’s starting to grow, spurred on by an ageing workforce looking to retire. How do we capture that expertise?” Accelerating adoption This segment of our discussion led naturally into a discussion on the extent to which Covid-19 and international skills shortages are accelerating adoption of AI and automated methods. This section was led by Michael Where Industry 4.0 and maintenance collide Talking Industry Chair Andy Pye reflects on the latest Talking Industry webinar, which covered Maintenance 4.0 - the use of advanced digital methods to nudge maintenance out of traditional systems towards preventive and predictive maintenance. Talking Industry