Demonstrate ROI with these simple, measurable economic benefits
If you’re a plant executive in the oil and gas, water treatment, or food and beverage sector, you’ve felt the pressure to trim costs and boost efficiencies, all while your workforce ages into retirement.
Increasingly, automation and digitization is helping you meet this challenge. But this trend has also led to a harder analysis of where to sink future capital investment.
This is especially true when considering IOT-enabled technologies like remote alarm notification software, which, as part of Industry 4.0, lets your workers respond quicker to break-fix issues through their smartphones, from anywhere at any time.
The organizations that succeed at this task are transforming their operations. Here are five ways you can prove the value of remote alarm notification software in your organization:
1/ Reduces unplanned downtime.
When equipment fails or systems go down due to preventable incidents, costs add up quickly. Slow response times to equipment alarms at a Nestle ice cream plant, for example, were increasing unplanned shutdowns, resulting in the loss of raw ingredients.
Implementing remote alarm notifications reduced tech response times by 60%, which virtually eliminated production shutdowns at the plant. It’s estimated that the prevention of lost ingredients combined with lost product revenue saves more than $100K each year.
2/ Reduces equipment repair/replacement.
Often equipment fails prematurely due to missed maintenance. For example, lift station compressors may fail prematurely if high temperatures exceed the norm too often. Remote alarm notifications help operators to distinguish between minor and major alarms to proactively flag where problem equipment may need special attention.
Doing this for all lift stations in Llano’s water treatment network results in substantial savings in the yearly capital equipment replacement budget.
3/ Reduces maintenance costs.
Maintenance costs can be substantially reduced with a robust alarm notification system. Not only does the incidence of “unscheduled” maintenance reduce, but so does the need to have personnel on site at all times.
For instance, when environmental monitoring firm Ecologia switched from on-site technicians to off-site remote alarm notification monitoring, total maintenance hours were reduced by a staggering 96%.
4/ Reduces labor costs.
When it comes to automation projects, most facilities today are under enormous pressure to reduce personnel costs without compromising service. In the case of a municipal wastewater treatment plant in Falmouth MA, for instance, state regulations require the plant to be staffed 24/7 unless waiver conditions are met.
The town calculated this would require 8 extra highly trained operators working at the plant after hours, which was well beyond their budget. Building a resilient automation plant connected by a flexible remote alarm notification system enabled them to meet the waiver requirements with on-call staff working from home. Using a conservative FTE cost estimate of $60K yields a $0.5M annual savings in labor alone.
5/ Increases plant productivity.
Every facility, particularly in highly regulated sectors like energy, wastewater, food, or power has to build in safety tolerances when configuring alarm ranges to prevent catastrophic failures.
Running your systems closer to upper machine efficiency tolerances can bring about significant throughput increases. For instance, after implementing a new SCADA and remote alarm notification solution at their food processing facility, one of our clients tracked savings of $100,000 in wastewater chemicals alone. Another study of a 100,000 bpd oil producer indicates that a mere 0.2% increase in throughput produces an annual benefit of $1.68M.
Do more with less
Until now, you’ve probably found it challenging to calculate the economic benefits of lesser known components in the automation project chain like remote alarm notification software. The tips and tangible use cases above will not only aid in your understanding but also help you demonstrate solid ROI to justify the capital investment.
WIN-911 is the Market Leader
WIN-911 gives you more visibility into your systems to make more timely, informed decisions and maximize uptime. What sets us apart is our easily configured alarm notification software, direct connects to your existing SCADAs, support for the most comprehensive list of notification methods and our vast worldwide network of system integrators and distributors.
