Overview and Scope
Highland Spring is the largest producer and supplier of naturally sourced bottled water in the UK. They operate with highly critical assets throughout their manufacturing plants including: blow moulders, rinsers, fillers and labellers. If one of these assets goes down, production comes to a halt. Therefore, it is key that the health and condition of these assets is continuously monitored and maintained to the highest standard. To ensure the assets are running to their optimum and the site doesn’t suffer unexpected shutdowns, Highland Spring selected AVT Reliability® to assist them with their condition monitoring (CM) journey, with the goal of increasing plant reliability and protecting these critical assets.
Project Aims
- To increase productivity
- Extend machinery lifespan
- Optimise the periodic maintenance program
- Reduce machinery maintenance expenditures
Product Selection
AVT Reliability® have products and services to suit different scenarios. Following a site survey, AVT Reliability® engineers advised that the best suited CM technique to increase plant reliability was Vibration analysis using Machine Sentry® Online. MSO-1 is ideal for vibration monitoring on continuously running, highly critical assets. The data being recorded is trended in real time, which allows remedial works to be carried out at a planned outage. Readings are automatically uploaded to cloud based platform Machine Sentry® and secured to ISO27001. As the platform is cloud based, engineers are able to analyse and report on data within minutes, not days wherever they are in the world. All asset health and analytics are completed in the same system meaning all data remains in one location.
MSO-1 in Action
On January 7th 2020, the MSO-1 system at Highland Springs generated an email alert which identified increasing vibration levels on the outfeed start wheel bearing. This email alert allowed engineers to take action and investigate as soon as possible before the situation got out of hand. After analysis from expert engineers at AVT Reliability® and discussion with client, the conclusion was that the vibration increase was due to a possible bearing issue. Bearings had not been replaced since 2003. As the fault was found early, further damage to the asset was prevented. If the fault had gone undetected, there could have been catastrophic damage, resulting in a more expensive repair and extended plant downtime.
Benefits
The below table shows the cost of maintenance for both the planned and unplanned scenarios for Highland Spring, for the bearing failure which was detected using Machine Sentry®.
| Area | Cost per hour | Total amount of hours | Total cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Line 4 with MSO-1 | £350 | 72 hours | £25,200 |
| Line 4 if unplanned | £350 | 120 hours | £42,000 |
| Saving | £16,800 | ||
MSO-1 allowed engineers to analyse the data collected and predict when a failure was going to happen. The engineers at Highland Spring were then able to plan scheduled downtime and complete the planned work scope within 3 days saving 48 hours of repair time and a total of £16,800. When the cost of the Machine Sentry® system is removed, the actual saving from this installing MSO-1 is £10,300 after this one incident alone.
Following the work completed by AVT Reliability®, David Simpson, Site Engineering Manager at Highland Spring Group said:
“To assist our goal in achieving a world class engineering department, the biggest area to improve was to reduce reactive maintenance and supply our operation customers a reliable preventative maintenance schedule, ensuring machine up time is increased to meet our growing market place demand. AVT Reliability® came onsite and presented the products they could supply to help us achieve this, Machine Sentry® Online was chosen and installed with almost no disruption to our production line.
The benefits are huge with the early warning reports identifying potential issues and reporting recommended actions which we add to our weekly maintenance plan and rectify. Machine Sentry® Online will be my option as we roll this excellent analysis tool to out other production lines.”