Essential for optimizing a business strategy: Line of Sight supported by Internet of Things

Business strategies and the maintenance activities of a company are directly connected to each other. This direct connection or direct line is supported through the Internet of Things (IoT). In this article, you will learn about the importance for assets to perform in line with the business strategy. Smart maintenance of assets is therefore necessary in order to achieve maximum value.

Examining the HVAC market has learned us that critical HVAC assets are connected to management systems whose main task is to control and to regulate the asset, but there are few solutions that proactively extract data from industrial HVAC assets for smart maintenance purposes. That’s because these industrial control systems are not developed or designed from a maintenance point of view.

For this article, let’s focus on cooling towers, air handling units, chillers and industrial boilers because they are amongst the most critical HVAC assets. Most of you know that the protocols which allow communication in HVAC are varied, think about BACnet, Modbus, LON, KNX… Nevertheless, it is rather difficult for installation companies to manage these control protocols profoundly. That’s because HVAC installers are highly thermodynamically skilled, but they don’t necessarily have profound knowledge of these control protocols.

IoT is the facilitator to make abstraction of the difficulty of these protocols. In the past, there was quite some programming needed, whereas now, a smart IoT platform simplifies the situation a lot.

But how are IoT, business strategies and HVAC maintenance activities linked to each other?

Linking your business strategy with smart maintenance

HVAC assets are generally of great strategic importance for a company that bears responsibility for the assets within that company (asset management). More and more, the well-known ISO 55000 standard finds its way to give asset management a theoretical framework. In this framework, VALUE becomes the central point of managing the assets. Value creation is mainly about realizing and guaranteeing the balance between costs, risks and the performance of an asset.

PhD candidate Ing. Jan Stoker MSc. MEng. indicates on the website of Maincontract that there is a direct line between the highest level of a company and the maintenance activity. This direct line is called ‘The Line of Sight’. As the image below clarifies, the highest level is that level where the organisation is managed.

The line of sight can be described as linking the highest intangible good of a company to the smallest element: the asset. The highest intangible good of a company refers to its brand promise and strategy. To give an example: for our own company ABN Air Management Group, the highest intangible good is delivering SPEED to its customers. Maintenance has therefore not purely a technical function, but certainly a business function as well. It is directly aligned with the strategy of our company. Our vision on HVAC asset maintenance in this perspective is consequently:

• Maintaining the integrity of the HVAC asset
• Improving the performance of the HVAC asset
• But also demonstrating that the value of the HVAC asset contributes to the strategic objective of ABN

Smart maintenance, and together with it the underlying applications of IoT should contribute to fine-tuning the line of sight of an organisation.

IoT as enabler of the Line of Sight

We believe that the line of sight can be strongly supported by IoT. In practice, there might be some problems with the implementation of this IoT technology. How did we cover these difficulties at ABN? By simply using the AKILI platform for HVAC analytics, allowing us to deliver SPEED to our customers. What I experienced, is that it were not necessarily technical issues that had to be tackled. Rather a shift in mind-set played an important role.

An HVAC asset undoubtedly creates maintenance needs: firstly, there is the degradation of HVAC assets due to its use. As an example, I can think of decreasing stability of the water temperature. Secondly, HVAC assets that fail result in total loss of outputs.

Maintenance needs can be expressed by planned repair shutdowns and unplanned failure shutdowns. For the latter, IoT can help by avoiding unplanned failures. For planned and unplanned maintenance shutdowns, IoT can help reducing the repair hours due to so called First Time Fix repairs. First Time Fix repairs are those kind of repairs where the right replacement part is already available.

Furthermore, maintenance needs can be expressed by examining how the HVAC asset is used. Is its use consistent with the way that the HVAC asset has been initially designed? Because in reality, the installed cooling capacity is often excessive for the load. Consequently, the energy consumption is way too high. IoT provides insights in those matters and this technology must thus be seen as a value creator of an organisation. 

Conclusion

Some key questions that have to be taken into consideration to implement IoT in HVAC assets are:

• What information is needed to know whether the HVAC asset is performing profitably or not? For air handling units, automatic filter detection algorithms indicate when the air filter needs to be replaced. The filter detection algorithm can be in relation to delta P as well as in function of optimal energy consumption.
• What data is needed to generate correct information? For a chiller, the number of start/stops of the compressor over a period of time in combination with thermodynamic parameters (pressure, temperature etc.) will indicate the optimum moment for maintenance.

We can state that maintenance has become some sort of behavioural therapy for HVAC assets (predictive maintenance). In that way, the maintenance engineers can be metaphorically seen as doctors in a company, predicting the health of the assets in order to achieve maximum value. The Line of Sight and IoT provide you with the tools to make this ideal a reality.