The benefits of integrating calibration software with a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS).

For process manufacturers today, having a reliable, seamlessly integrated set of IT systems across the plant, or across multiple sites, is critical to business efficiency, profitability and growth.

Maintaining plant assets – whether that includes production line equipment, boilers, furnaces, special purpose machines, conveyor systems or hydraulic pumps – is equally critical for these companies. This is particularly true if the company is part of an assetintensive industry, where equipment and plant infrastructure is large, complex and expensive. Also, if stoppages to production lines due to equipment breakdowns are costly, implementing the latest computerised maintenance management (CMM) systems can help save precious time and money.

In the process industries, a small but critical part of a company’s asset management strategy should be the calibration of process instrumentation. For this, Beamex’s calibration management software, Beamex® CMX, has proved itself time and time again across many industry sectors, including pharmaceuticals, chemicals, nuclear, metal processing, paper, oil and gas. Manufacturing plants need to be sure that their instrumentation products – temperature sensors, pressure transducers, flow meters and the like – are performing and measuring to specified tolerances. If sensors drift out of their specification range, the consequences can be disastrous, perhaps resulting in costly production downtime, safety issues or batches of inferior quality goods being produced, which then have to be scrapped.

Beamex® CMX helps companies document, schedule, plan, analyze and optimize their calibration work. Seamless communication between CMX and ‘smart’ calibrators means that companies have the ability to automate pre-def ined calibration procedures. As well as retrieving and storing calibration data, CMX can also download detailed instructions for operation before and after calibrating. The most common types of download include procedures, reminders and safety-related information.

Seamless communication with calibrators also provides many practical benefits such as a reduction in paperwork, elimination of human error associated with manual recording, and the ability to speed up the calibration task. CMX also stores the complete calibration history of process instruments and produces fully traceable calibration records.

Today, most process manufacturers use some sort of CMM system that sits alongside their calibration management system. Common CMM systems available include SAP, Maximo and Datastream, otherwise the company may have developed its own, in-house software for maintenance management.

Whilst Beamex® CMX Calibration Software functions very well as a standalone calibration management system, customers using the software in this way are not reaping all the rewards they could if they were to integrate CMX with their CMM system. The CMM system is also likely to have been implemented before the calibration management software and so will normally be the first port of call for maintenance staff and for generating all work orders.

But the good news for customers of Beamex® CMX Professional or Beamex® CMX Enterprise software is that CMX can now easily be integrated to CMM systems, whether it is a Maximo, SAP or Datastream CMM system. Beamex offers a ‘standard’ integration package, although most customers will require a customized version that suits their existing software and maintenance strategy.

Integrating CMX with a CMM system means that plant hierarchy and all work orders for process instruments can be generated and maintained in the customer’s CMM system. Calibration work orders can easily be transferred to CMX Calibration Software. Then, once the calibration work order has been executed, CMX sends an acknowledgement order of this work back to the customer’s CMM system. All detailed calibration results are stored and available on the CMX database.

Jarmo Hyvärinen, Sales Manager at Beamex comments: “Beamex’s customers have been asking us for some time whether we can integrate our CMX software with their maintenance management systems. Our integration services were introduced recently, and it has generated high interest among the customers. Many customers are currently going through the integration process.”

These customers are in the food and beverage, oil and gas, energy, steel processing and pharmaceuticals industries and, according to Hyvärinen, use a SAP or Maximo CMM system. “The integration project normally involves three parties: the customer, the CMM system software partner and Beamex. With our customers, Beamex’s part of the integration has been successful. However, the customer may have a large CMM system and a considerable amount of data keying to perform before the integration is complete. However, once finished, the integration should save these companies time, reduce costs and increase productivity by preventing unnecessary double effort and re-keying of work orders in separate systems. When there is no need to manually re-key the data, typing errors are eliminated.

This improves the quality of the entire system. Integration will also enable these companies to automate their calibration management with smart calibrators.”

Beamex’s standard integration interface uses the XML (Extensible Markup Language) data file format, which enables the sharing of structured data across different information systems. Data fields such as position ID, device ID, location, serial number and work order number can be transferred from the customer’s CMM system to CMX. Similarly, data can be transferred the other way, including work order numbers; position ID; maximum error; pass/fail notifications; calibration date and time; and who carried out the calibration task.

“Of course, in reality, the customer will require more data fields to be transferred, but our standard package is the first building block on the bridge between the two systems,” explains Hyvärinen. “Often, a data exchange module or interface is required that sits between the two systems and so the customer’s CMM system specialist will need to be involved here.”

Although there’s certainly a growing number of manufacturing companies today, at boardroom level, that are beginning to realise that maintenance management is now an issue which deserves enterprise-wide, perhaps multisite, attention, in general, most plant or maintenance managers still don’t get a voice in the higher echelons of the boardroom. Maintenance is simply viewed as a necessary cost to the business and no more.

But the fact is, any initiatives (including software integration) that can support an asset management strategy are likely to help save costs from a company’s balance sheet. Hence, the software community’s latest buzzword, ‘EAM’, or enterprise asset management. EAM is more than just maintenance management software. It’s all about companies taking a business-wide view of all their plant equipment and co-ordinating maintenance activities and resources with other departments and sites, particularly with production teams. Integrating a CMM system with calibration management software is an important step in the right direction here, particularly if the company has a high volume of process instruments that need calibrating regularly.

Savings from EAM are reasonably well-documented and come in various guises, the most common benefits being: less equipment breakdowns (leading to a reduction in overall plant downtime); a corresponding increase in asset utilisation or plant uptime; better management of spare parts and equipment stocks; more efficient use of maintenance staff; and optimised scheduling of maintenance tasks and resources.

“The key to success is really the quality of information you input to the software. Part of this relates to the success of the up-front review process, as well as the ongoing discipline of your maintenance team that uses the system. The data has to be as close to 100% accurate as possible to get maximum benefit from the system,” concludes Hyvärinen.