Best Practice Pumps: Cost reduction & Availability increase

Maintenance Partners does not only apply Engineered Services to compressors, generators and turbines, but also to other rotating machines such as pumps and motors.

Here we give a working example from a customer with a pump population of 200 units:

The improvements have been realised within a contract in which maintenance activities & tasks have been defined and rates have been agreed for standard overhauls. The contract concerns 200 centrifugal pump units with motor drives between 30 and 400kW.

The API pump units have been operating for 5-8 years in a petrochemical environment. The site is a Seveso facility where Atex regulations also apply.

Maintenance of 200 pumps

The improvements have been realised within a contract in which maintenance activities & tasks have been defined and rates have been agreed for for standard overhauls. The contract concerns 200 volumetric pump units with motor drives between 30 and 400kW.

The API pump units have been operating for 5-8 years in a petrochemical environment. The site is a Seveso facility where Atex regulations apply.

How?

Within the contract, Maintenance Partners is responsible for the total maintenance and availability of the units, each consisting of pump, coupling and motor. The maintenance activities are split into preventive & predictive maintenance and repairs:

Preventive- & predictive maintenance

Each pump unit is checked preventively every 4 months. The preventive checks include:

• Visual check of oil levels and refilling where needed
• Visual check of motor and coupling
• Visual check for leakage at seals and flanges
• Torque check of foundation and coupling bolts
• Check of Mechanical Seal quench reservoir for volume and pollution
• Check and record operating vibration levels
• Check and record suction/discharge/flow/power parameters

In addition, the alignment of each pump is checked annually and adjusted where necessary.

An inspection report is drawn up for each check or inspection. The reports are checked and compared to the most recent predecessor and then communicated to the customer with recommendations, all reports are saved in a dedicated Customer Portal.

When an inspection shows problems that cannot or do not need to be repaired immediately, the repair activity is planned for a suitable point in the future. In extreme and very rare cases, the pump and/or motor is removed for urgent overhaul or repair.

Curative maintenance

When repairs are necessary, the pumps and/or motors are repaired within 3, 5 or 7 working days (depending on the damage). Fixed rates have been agreed for onsite works, standard overhauls and specific activities such as delivery of certain spare parts.

Mechanical seals in stock

To enable us to provide a rapid turnaround, the most common mechanical seals are kept in  stock and are directly available. Stock Mechanical Seals include, Chetra, Burgmann and AES. Moreover, our relationship with other seal suppliers is such that the quickest possible delivery is guaranteed. This eliminates the long delivery time of mechanical seals when performing an overhaul and allows for quick re-commissioning of the pump units.

Reporting & Evaluation

All reporting and communication concerning the pump units is done via MP’s Customer Portal. This is a cloud application that offers solutions for:

• Sharing large files and documents
• Centralising reporting & administration
• Reports and files immediately available for all parties
• Ensure that latest versions are always available

In addition, the Customer Portal offers the possibility to track the maintenance record on the functional level as well as on the individual level per machine by the unique serial number.

The customer receives a monthly report of all works executed within the contract and an evaluation is made every 6 months.

Result: Cost reduction & increased availability 

At the end of the second year, the result of our approach to pump maintenance is clear. The availability of the pump population has increased considerably.

The number of cases of unplanned curative maintenance has reduced from 13 at the beginning of the contract to 2 at the end of year 2:

Simultaneously, the maintenance costs have been reduced by 50% and the share of curative maintenance (CM – unplanned shutdown) has been 1/3 of the original maintenance costs. The number of planned activities (RM) has increased thanks to the preventive and predictive inspections (PM).

To increase reliability certain design improvements (IM) have been applied. Improvements include upgrading of mechanical seals from single to double versions, improvements to seal surface materials and other material upgrades.

Full alternative to OEM

The results shown in this example confirm that Maintenance Partners is a fully capable alternative to the OEMs. Maintenance Partners offers:

• Extensive experience
  • 1350 pumps in contracts
• Engineering of Spare Parts
  • 3D scanning
  • In house manufacturing
• Excellent Supply Chain Solutions
• Lead times: Weeks instead of months

Besides this, Maintenance Partners has experience with all common pump brands, such as:

Interested?

The maintenance approach can be applied to every installation, regardless of size. Are you interested in lowering your maintenance costs or improving the reliability of your machines? Contact us at +32(0)3 541 7140 or send us a message: