According to figures from ARC Advisory Group
plant downtime costs come it at about $12,500 per hour. That’s an
average of course, downtime at some plants will be cheaper while others
— especially continuous process operations like refineries — are much,
much more costly.

“Downtime is a big concern because the cost associated with it is so
high,” says Larry O’Brien, a research director with ARC who specializes in
process automation solutions, adding that a single incident at the
aforementioned refinery can wipe out the plant’s annual profitability. “If you
have an unplanned incident and it takes you 10 days to get your plant back up
and running again you can imagine how much you are losing.”

O’Brien says that Automation Services has become the fastest growing
sector of the automation industry. “We see the areas that are growing the
fastest: Remote monitoring, outsourced maintenance, training and education
services and high level management consulting like audit of alarms. Everything
from patch management to version upgrades and cyber security. The big vendors
can really handle the breadth of needs. It just depends on what the end user
requires. Technical support tends to be more ad hoc, but it’s growing along
with the rest of the market. Some suppliers are really good at it.”

Magnetecs,
Inc. is a case in point. The Inglewood, CA-based company is
developing an electromagnetic catheter guidance system for operating
rooms.
When they started laying out the control system in January they had a
short
deadline and relied extensively on their vendor, Siemens Industry, Inc.
to meet it. To complicate the situation the control engineer doing
the PLC design work hadn’t worked with Siemens in almost two decades
and was
carrying baggage from a negative experience.

“My experience with Siemens in the past was sketchy,” says Mason
Mattenson, Magnetecs Inc. “In the early 90’s I was working on a project with an
S5 PLC, we were having a problem with it and I went online and tried to get
support and before they’d let me into the literature library I had to fill out
an application. A day or so later I was told I couldn’t have access ‘because I
wasn’t in Europe.’ Hence my use of a competing PLC vendor ever since. When I
got the call for this project everything looked great but they were using
Siemens because of its penetration overseas. I took the interview anyway and
when I saw what they were doing I decided to see if Siemens had changed.

Today, Mattenson is glad he made the decision he did. “I was just
overwhelmed with the support I got. I couldn’t believe it. I went from never
having seen a Siemens processor to having the system up and running in three
months and a lot of the credit for that goes to the help I got from Siemens. It
actually took me by surprise because after working with another major
automation supplier I was used to jumping through a lot of hoops.

“Typically when you have a PLC problem, it’s at a very inconvenient
time. You don’t want to waste time looking around for a customer ID number, you
just want to get some help.”

“Everyone has problems. You are judged on how you react to those
problems,” says Al Corcoran, a marketing manager responsible for Siemens’
SIEPRO support program. Unlike 1991, Siemens now offers a basic support package
that provides free online access to all the relevant manuals and free hotline
support.

“The online site is wide open,” says Corcoran. “There is no fee to
participate. Our strategy is to make as much information available to our
customers as easily as possible. There is no exclusive content.”

Additionally, the company offers the pay-to-play SIEPRO program for
customers that either have more demanding or unique needs. “Priority customers
tend to be continuous process industries with very high downtime costs.”

According to Corcoran the benefits to end users are significant. “The
biggie is time. You get a shorter time to solution which in turn saves money
associated with downtime. Ultimately this leads to improved total cost of
ownership and improved overall equipment effectiveness; two metrics that are
becoming more and more important.”

Corcoran believes that having a good services relationship with your end
users is a critical competitive factor in the current economic climate. He
refers to a case study involving a customer satisfaction survey by a large
telecommunications vendor. “All the respondents who answered ‘will you do
business with us in the future’ with a ‘yes’ had experienced a failure and had
a positive service experience. That was like a light going on for me. When a
customer has a good services experience, you drive their loyalty through the
roof.”

Average cost of downtime per year:

Refining: 1-8%

PetroChem: 2-5%

Food and Bev: 1-10%

~ Larry O'Brien, ARC

 

For information on Siemens Support Programs please click here.

For access to the Siemens Support Portal please click here.

::Design World::

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Filed Under: Factory automation

 

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