Top Guns Provide Online Support

Every unscheduled minute of downtime costs thousands of dollars. Who will you, the operations manager, call? If you’re connected to an active, around-the-clock, call-and-online-services center, that’s who you’ll dial.

What differentiates continuous online support, though, is literally the difference between using the telephone and the Internet—and the range of services varies accordingly. Basic may be the self-service type, in which you dial-in to the center via your modem. Top-of-the-line may be the continuous monitoring of your plant, in which the center corrects the problem remotely or contacts you and assists you. In between, a step-above-basic option is a vendor-designed, pre-configured modem which allows vendor technicians to directly dial-in to your system—after you’ve contacted them—and then they solve the problem. The second-to-the-best option can be a pre-established team of engineers qualified to deal with your processes and connected electronically to your plant.

Those are the choices Rockwell Automation (www.rock wellautomation.com) offers, says John Strohmenger, who manages the company’s In.Site Operations Center, in Cleveland. “Whatever the client has at his end, we’ll connect to. In.Site, our highest level of support, is an always-on connection. We have a broadband connection we drop into the facility. We connect to all of the customer’s intelligent devices on the process line—the controllers, drives, human-machine-interface, anything that gathers and shares information.”

Because real-time monitoring is involved, a vendor-installed kiosk on the plant floor that holds several intelligent devices is connected to the support center via a T1 line. “Through that broadband connection, we have the data warehouse. That, in turns, feeds all the equipment in our command center. We see it (data) real-time and it’s stored. Real-time is for trending and troubleshooting. There’s no other way to do it this quickly. Literally, it only takes seconds, especially if it’s a hard fault,” Strohmenger explains.

The always-on connection finds particular use in maintenance—forever an issue at any manufacturing facility. “We can look into the future, regarding the devices, and tell the plant the device may need to be replaced. For example, regarding motor current and spinning, our predictive and proactive maintenance is geared to processes, but also to the devices (e.g., drives),” Strohmenger says. “For example, with paper-machine dryers, as they fill up with water, we’ll start to see fluctuations in current and that allow us to tell the facility that on the next shutdown, the operators need to drain the dryers.”

Located in Rockwell Automation’s main North American product-support center, the online-services center is staffed 24/7 with process engineers who individually have more than 20 years experience each, he adds. “We have three engineers per shift. These are some of our ‘Top Guns,’ who know the processes inside and out. We have 200 customer-support engineers outside the door. Support from the larger center includes communications, controllers and drives, among other things.”

In the online-call center are the bells and whistles that allow the engineers to know what’s occurring in a specific plant. That technology facilitates immediate reaction, something crucial when the process is stopped. “If we’re supporting a paper machine, that means we’re supporting the paper process,” states Strohmenger. Besides the electrical-based support, the supplier can also tie into vibration analyses to monitor processes’ mechanical health. Not yet active, but in place, is the infrastructure for mobile and stationary satellite-connected options.

Return on investment (ROI) for the high-end, always-on service is approximately three months, he says. And at one upstate New York paper manufacturer, the center’s immediate reaction to downtime events produced even better results. “They said we saved them a little more than $1 million through prevention of problems and increased efficiency. The ROI was less than a month.”

C. Kenna Amos, [email protected]