Many large plants across the U.S. understand the potential for predictive maintenance programs to decrease unscheduled equipment repairs and downtime, and to ensure reliable delivery of critical services like power and light. Few large industrial enterprises have undertaken the kind of transformative work-culture changes that Air Liquide has pursued to measure and correlate risk, reliability, efficiency and safety across 112 plants.
The results are indisputable: unplanned maintenance actions reduced by 95% over three years, representing millions of dollars in avoided cost and unknown savings in avoided lost production. More importantly, Air Liquide has changed behaviors across a broad swath of its production operations by using web-based reporting tools and dashboards to measure program compliance, rank order risk, prioritize maintenance initiatives, and to raise general awareness about the health of production operations among executives and plant managers alike.
Air Liquide Large Industries (Air Liquide) is a member of Air Liquide Group, the world leader in gases for industry, health and the environment. Air Liquide Group is present in 80 countries with approximately 43,000 employees. The company stresses three core values: efficiency, reliability and safety. These core values have become the cornerstones of its ambitious and comprehensive predictive maintenance program -- a program that is second only to the U.S. Navy in both scale and the adoption of advanced machine condition monitoring capabilities.
In an industry where plants generally maintain autonomous and unspecified condition monitoring programs, Air Liquide chose a different path when it announced that it would partner with predictive maintenance analytical services company Azima DLI to drive a standardized machine health monitoring program across all of its U.S. plants. Through the lens of the Macondo oil well spill, Air Liquide's decision three years ago looks prescient, and puts it in the vanguard of leading companies moving aggressively to introduce consistent processes and procedures including machine health monitoring to reduce risk and improve safety and reliability.
However, Air Liquide has gone beyond machine health, and risk and cost management. The company has leveraged communications tools and infrastructure to drive a level of efficiency in production operations that will help it achieve its strategic performance goals.
Air Liquide's primary business need was creating a uniform methodology to ensure that its operations met customers' expectations for reliability, safety and efficiency. Air Liquide committed to changing its maintenance and reliability culture, with the goal of making comprehensive operations and machinery health information readily accessible to all corporate stakeholders -- from plant managers to the executive suite -- so the health of production operations could be easily viewed, assessed and managed.
The reliability program partnership between Air Liquide and Azima DLI covers 112 plants across six business zones. Each zone has its own specific needs, priorities and budgets and has the flexibility to customize elements of their portion of the program.
Using Azima DLI's web-based Reliability Portal to centralize data analysis and maintenance recommendations, Air Liquide gained view-level access to its machine condition analysis program database. Operations and maintenance staff have direct access to program statistics, machine level analysis, and machine health history, either remotely or through any Internet-enabled device.
View article on one page