Business Profits With Integrated Calibration Management Software

By Anders Nyman, Product Manager at Beamex Oy in Finland

For process manufacturers today, having a reliable, seamlessly integrated set of IT systems across the plant, or across multiple sites, is critical to business efficiency, profitability, and growth. Maintaining plant assets — whether that includes production line equipment, boilers, furnaces, special purpose machines, conveyor systems, or hydraulic pumps — is equally critical for these companies. Maintenance management has become an issue that deserves enterprise-wide and perhaps multisite attention, especially if the company is part of an asset-intensive industry, where equipment and plant infrastructure is large, complex, and expensive. If stoppages to production lines due to equipment breakdowns are costly, implementing the latest computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) might save precious time and money.

In the process industries, a small, but critical part of a company's asset management strategy should be the calibration of process instrumentation. Manufacturing plants need to be sure that their instrumentation products — temperature sensors, pressure transducers, flow meters, and the like — are performing and measuring to specified tolerances. If sensors drift out of their specification range, the consequences can be disastrous, perhaps resulting in costly production downtime, safety issues, or batches of inferior quality goods being produced, which then have to be scrapped.