Asset Performance Management
Assembly Line
Streamlining Cell Tower Inspections and Site Assessments with Visual Data Management
Tower owners, operators, and contractors are turning to new visual data management solutions to provide the accurate and reliable data needed to support efficient cell tower maintenance and technology rollout programs. The availability of accurate and up-to-date site assessment data streamlines operations, enhances decision-making, and significantly reduces operational costs. By leveraging new visual data management systems such as Optelos in combination with drone data collection, 3D digital twin point cloud models and AI technologies, companies in the telecom industry are revolutionizing the process for how to inspect, manage and maintain their tower assets, yielding significant cost savings and operational efficiencies.
RF engineering can use the digital twin models to verify the RF design was properly implemented and built to specification (antenna placement & orientation of the RAD center). The RAN group can evaluate the impact of the overall network and performance for each individual cell tower. The ability to house all CAD drawings, 3D models, shelter photos, inventory, inspections and other required documents in one location can speed up collaborative work dramatically. One major telecom provider reported that site assessment team meetings were now 60% shorter, and decisions were made in the meetings, versus leaving the meeting with a series of “go gets” for required information.
Turning Cranes into Smart Devices with AI and IOT Technology
On many jobsites, our cranes function as control towers – orchestrating and driving a tremendous amount of construction activity. Seeking innovative ways to leverage IoT (internet of things) and AI (artificial intelligence) technologies to optimize crane efficiency, Turner’s Innovation Department engaged with Versatile, a construction technology start-up that captures crane data and turns it into actionable insights that can improve project performance.
Using AI, the device learns and classifies each item picked, captures the weight of the item, and records the cycle time of the lift so the team can understand exactly how the crane is being used. Through an online and mobile dashboard, project teams review data, set custom alerts and notifications, and view weekly reports generated by Versatile.
CraneView™ data improves our construction planning and scheduling, leading to increased productivity and better crane operations. Additionally, it enhances site safety by identifying unsafe behaviors such as riggers overloading or engaging in dangerous loading practices. This allows Turner to observe, communicate, and correct unsafe activity among riggers, signalmen, and operators on the project.
Industrial Asset Performance Management has a data problem
Historically, the solution for solving Asset Performance Management use cases has been to invest in siloed systems (e.g., ERP systems), niche solutions (e.g., IoT Applications), or run multi-year “lighthouse” projects with little-to-no ROI to show after months or years of data wrangling and deployment effort. If it takes two years to deploy an APM application at your lighthouse facility, do you really have 100 years to wait until the same solution is deployed across the remaining 50 sites?
When people are spending 90% of their time searching, preparing, and governing data, there’s little time left to invest in gaining better, data-driven insights. Without a coordinated and collaborative data management strategy, APM initiatives will continue to fall short of their ROI expectations.
Eliminate blind spots with asset monitoring across the plant
With technology-driven insights that don’t put pressure on headcount, plant managers can look to scale asset monitoring goals beyond critical assets to see machine health for all plant assets.
How to Use Data in a Predictive Maintenance Strategy
Free-Text and label correction engines are a solution to clean up missing or inconsistent work order and parts order data. Pattern recognition algorithms can replace missing items such as funding center codes. They also fix work order (WO) descriptions to match the work actually performed. This can often yield a 15% shift in root cause binning over non-corrected WO and parts data.
With programmable logic controller-generated threshold alarms (like an alarm that is generated when a single sensor exceeds a static value), “nuisance” alarms are often generated and then ignored. These false alarms quickly degrade the culture of an operating staff as their focus is shifted away from finding the underlying problem that is causing the alarm. In time, these distractions threaten the health of the equipment, as teams focus on making the alarm stop rather than addressing the issue.
Industry 4.0 and the pursuit of resiliency
There are two parts to the Zero D story. Visual inspection and asset performance management (APM). Visual inspection uses computer vision models focused on quality inspection. APM uses machine learning models based on time series data to determine health of assets and probable failures in the future. Toyota is using Maximo Visual Inspection, and now they are also using the Maximo Asset Performance Management (APM) suite. They tested Maximo APM on some of their machinery that does liquid cooling and found that was another problem area for them. By implementing the software into this pilot, they are now able to monitor the asset health 24×7 and predict probability of failure in the future.