Refineries have been ahead of upstream in deploying advanced
maintenance approaches. However, in the past few years, the upstream
industry has adopted many of the same techniques to improve capital
asset management. Best-in-class companies use a variety of techniques
to reduce maintenance costs, increase uptime, and increase
availability. These techniques include:
● Condition-based monitoring. Placement of sensors to measure
various conditions (temperature, vibration, etc.) to detect situations
that may indicate potential equipment failure. The more
sophisticated systems have alerting capabilities and are integrated
with enterprise asset management applications that can
automatically generate inspection or work orders.
● Predictive maintenance. Predictive maintenance goes beyond
condition-based maintenance in applying advanced analytics to
predict potential equipment failures, providing enough notice to
procure complex non-commodity replacement equipment. The