Energy technology company Emerson has released a new application designed to make it easier for power plant operations teams to capture, report, and respond to abnormal conditions that pose risks to reliability, safety, and performance.
AMS Inspection Rounds allows personnel to accurately record field condition data and automatically deliver that data to other plant systems where decision makers can drive effective action.
“Route-based inspections are a key line of defense for identifying abnormal and unsafe conditions that may reduce efficiency or put personnel in danger,” said Mani Janardhanan, vice president of product management, Plantweb and reliability at Emerson Automation Solutions.
“AMS Inspection Rounds helps ensure that issues impacting safety and reliability are detected, reported, and resolved earlier.”
He explained that most plants rely on manual inspection rounds to detect abnormal plant conditions not identified by sensors. With AMS Inspection Rounds, he said operators on rounds can electronically record any abnormal or hazardous conditions immediately, such as unusual equipment noise, spills, smells, excessive corrosion or safety hazards.
Condition data can be entered in real-time and timestamped for compliance and audit requirements.
AMS Inspection Rounds delivers condition data to other plant systems via a wired or secure wi-fi connection, eliminating the need for manual entry. It also provides automated workflows to operations and maintenance personnel while they are in the field, ensuring complete, consistent and repeatable collection of condition data.
Janardhanan added that with clear dashboards of routes, status, alerts, and action items, users can identify, schedule and coordinate steps for resolving issues more quickly. “Electronic recording of route data saves hours of time typically lost in transcribing paper notes to electronic media and simplifies the generation of audit trails — freeing personnel to focus on more important tasks. Operations and maintenance teams can also access historical data to identify and eliminate root causes of recurring problems.”