Summer has passed. Fall in upon us. Winter is coming. Are you ready?
For most in the Biomass Industry, and particularly the Northern areas, the dry season of good fuel and decent production values have put us into a little bit of a relaxed frame of mind.
We still have a few months of good production left but now is the time to get prepared for those less than optimum periods where you will struggle to make budget. Winter is coming.
All those issues that you had last year that have not been addressed. They are going to come back full on and possibly a slightly different version.
How do you address those reoccurring issues that kill your production numbers?
When you discuss these in your production meetings you hear, “That’s the way it has always been” or “its something we just have to live with”.
While in some cases that may be true. In others its just that people have given up. When that’s the difference between making budget or not then it may require another look.
You don’t have to live with what you have. The technologies and methods to increase performance on a consistent basis are readily available.
The big questions are: Where do you start? What do you address first? How do we change it and by how much?
One of the first places to look is in all that data that was collected last year. If you have a data historian that can be mined, then that is an excellent place to start. Often these gold mines of information are only utilized to generate monthly or annual reports. These reports typically get filed away and never to be seen again and only briefly scanned to begin with. Such a waste of a very useful tool that if used correctly can deliver exceptional results. This is not always a simple task and many combinations need to be reviewed. The challenge is recognizing what the data is telling you. How do you connect the dots?
If you don’t have a data historian then the first step may be to invest in a relatively simple version to start the data collection process. Even if you don’t have the budget for a full-blown system there are smaller or even simplified systems that can be implemented to get you started. With a hierarchical approach the initial determination of where to look can be focused so that you zero in on your greatest area of concern.
When taking this approach some interesting gems can be uncovered. Its all about the relationships.
When you can go back and look at the performance of the overall process, then drill down into each piece of equipment or individual systems and determine which was responsible for the major production setbacks. Then you can start to either address the component or be prepared to collect more data. The only caveat here is to be sure you are addressing the problem and not a symptom. Determine the root cause of the issue.
This is not a simple or easy effort. It takes time. It needs to be correlated to log books and even operator memories if they can be relied upon. There are a myriad of items that will contribute to lost production. Is it equipment breakdowns, poor fuel infeed conditions, fuel quality or condition, air distribution, etc. The list goes on and on. The challenge is to determine which is truly the major contributor and how much is it responsible for? Then the important question of is this a symptom or the true root cause. What looks like a root cause may only be the symptom of another issue. Don’t be too quick to jump to conclusions.
One of the areas that we continuously see overlooked is the cause effect and delays that can be correlated within a system. An example would be a low fuel level detected somewhere in the delivery system, how long does it take before the low flow starts to impact the system output and what the magnitude and duration of the issue are.
In some cases, there are conditions that are related to the equipment and environmental conditions that just can’t be corrected or would be cost prohibitive to correct. In these situations, we have found that once the condition is identified and is predicted then steps can be taken to avoid major losses due to these upset conditions and increase output during these periods. The compensation and work around may not produce maximum output but can achieve greater results or reduce the impact time of the issue to less than previously experienced. This is still going to return an increase in overall production.
The biggest challenge is to detect the condition as early as possible. The response may need to be amplified over time but if the situation is recognized and responded to early then its impact can be minimized.
What we always attempt to do is implement a response to a condition to see if we can improve the response and recovery. This is the case of adapting a response to a condition. You can’t fix a hardware problem with software, but you can sometimes limit the impact. This can be used as a temporary fix until the budget can be approved for the proper fix or to cover a period until the next scheduled shut down when the full implementation can be done. A manual intervention is often used just to see if we are going to impact production in the proper direction and get a gauge on how great the magnitude and the potential of the correction. This also gives an indication of just how much production can be impacted and help in determining the return on investment of implementing the changes.
This leads to our next discussion on change management which will be coming shortly so stay tuned.