How DC Water automated calibration

At one of the largest wastewater treatment plants in the world, DC Water’s Blue Plains Plant’s Process Engineering Maintenance Group has a crucial responsibility of calibrating over 1,000 instruments to help ensure proper water treatment. With the combination of Beamex Integrated Calibration Solution, comprised of Beamex equipment and software, they have improved the quality and accuracy of calibrations, while achieving a 75% time savings on the entire pressure calibration process. Furthermore, using the Beamex MC6 field calibrator and communicator for pressure calibrations has decreased the time it takes to conduct the calibration procedure itself in the field by over 80%.

All in all, the plant has experienced a dramatic time savings and implemented a more reliable calibration strategy while realizing a 100% return on investment in the first year. This short article explains how the Process Engineering Maintenance Group was able to achieve these accomplishments.

Running a facility of this size is no ordinary task and ensuring proper maintenance of the plant’s process instrumentation is essential to operating the plant safely and efficiently. The Process Engineering Maintenance Group consists of 18 people who are responsible for maintaining approximately 5,000 assets and calibrating 1,000+ of the mid to highly critical pressure, flow, level, and temperature instruments. As a part of the preventative maintenance (PM) program, a portion of the 1,000+ instruments are calibrated weekly based on instrument criticality, which is vital to the PM program.

Prior to implementing a Beamex solution, there were no standardized procedures or tools for calibration. The plant categorized technicians into 4 different levels, each using different equipment. Work results were inconsistent and the best calibration practice was based on the level the technician’s experience and their preferred toolset. These factors compounded into inconsistent quality of work and results. The lack of standardized practices also presented challenges to planning and scheduling activities because of the variability of man-hours required to perform calibration tasks.

Furthermore, hand-written documentation was generated only for the assets with the highest criticality factor and calibration of non-critical instruments had no written record. The lack of documentation led to calibrations being mistakenly re-scheduled, which resulted in duplication of work and diminishing productivity of maintenance resources. Conversely, some instruments weren’t being calibrated at all and ran to failure, which adversely impacted reliability.

Planning calibration work is now streamlined using CMX, yielding substantial time savings. The Maintenance Group uses fully electronic and paperless workflows by utilizing the MC6. Established procedures are downloaded to the MC6 directly from CMX for in situ calibration work. Procedures are programmed into the MC6, measurement errors are calculated and presented in real time, and all measurement data is captured electronically, providing completely automated calibration workflows. This level of automation closed the gap between junior and senior technicians allowing them to re-deploy senior technicians to QA/QC activities that include reviewing the calibration work of the more junior technicians. When performing calibrations in the field, the time savings has been over 80% from automating calibrations using the Beamex MC6 field calibrator and communicator.

In addition to time savings, there has also been substantial improvements to the quality of calibration. Prior to implementation of the Beamex ICS, a calibration test strategy was based on a simple 2 or 3 point test up the span. With the more streamlined workflow and automated documentation, they could now justify a more thorough strategy consisting of additional test points, as well as up and back down the span. This allowed them to now identify and capture critical hysteresis errors indicating potential instrument failures that they were unable to identify before.

Previously, for documentation, they had to hunt down whoever performed the calibration last to find the paper records. With the CMX software, they have automated calibration. They can automatically generate calibration certificates and attach these certificates inside of their maintenance management system, Maximo. This provides transparency and visibility to management. The electronic documentation also minimized the opportunity for human error. For instance, when they hook up to a HART or Fieldbus instrument they can easily identify the instrument and link the results to it, where as in the past, some records were mixed up or missing altogether. In result, when calibrating a pressure transmitter, for example, the entire calibration process, from planning, to performing calibrations and finally documenting the results, the Beamex ICS solution has generated a 75% time savings.

Through automated calibration, DC Water has been able to meet the increasing requirements associated with control system upgrades and evolving compliance. Implementing a paperless solution enabled the automation of manual work processes and these streamlined workflows enables them to accomplish more work with the same or less resources with a total return on their investment within the first year.