For over 100 years SKF has been and still is the world leader in anti-friction bearings. Over the last 40 years SKF Reliability Services division has developed a portfolio of services, products and solutions to help our customers improve performance of their assets and facilities as well as decrease running cost and improve reliability.

SKF Reliability Services division has been present in the Egyptian market for the past 20 years offering a range of services solutions and products to our industrial customers in all industrial segments.

The range of services and products offered are:

• Mechanical services and redesign
• PdM and machine condition detection and analysis services and products.
• Asset management services (maintenance strategy development and optimization)
• Inventory management
• Culture change management
• Process management and workflow development and optimization.

Case Study 1: Petrochemical Plant – Machine Condition Detection and Maintenance Optimization Program
A leading petrochemical company in the gulf area started realized that the rate of consumption of parts and the rate of stoppage due to unforeseen failures was much higher than the bench marks for the industry in balance of plant (BOP) equipment.

SKF reliability services were asked to conduct an investigation into the situation and the following elements were the focus of the investigation:

1. Pumps (Product and cooling)
2. Pipes and fittings (Integrity / efficiency / insulation)
3. Driver motors and couplings
4. Gear Boxes

Findings:

1. Duplication of maintenance work and over maintaining of some assets
2. Under maintaining of some equipment due to high dependence on Preventive Maintenance (PM) and unbalanced maintenance program.
3. Improper use of lubricants (Too much and not the correct lubricant for the application)
4. Inefficient use of machine condition detection techniques (MCD)

SKF reliability systems estimated that the customer company could achieve an improvement in down time cost, maintenance inventory and maintenance spending of 25% (20MM USD Twenty Million USD) in the first year then followed by (6MM USD 6 Million USD) saving year on year for the following four years based on the following:

1. Through balancing the maintenance strategy and increasing machine condition detection utilization maintenance will be more focused and less parts will be required as well as a significant decrease in downtime needed for maintenance.
2. Elimination of duplicate activities and balancing the activities for all assets based on criticality assessment (actual criticality of the asset).
3. Establishing a correct lubrication program, identifying the correct lubricants, identifying correct lubricant quantities per lubrication point, supplying metered lubrication equipment and training of maintenance technicians.
4. Reducing maintenance inventory by:

• Through better utilization of predictive techniques, better maintenance planning is possible eliminating the need for excess inventory.
• Implementing correct ordering and re-ordering procedures, eliminates excessive ordering of parts.
• Contracting inventory to parts suppliers, eliminating the need for in house stock.
• Optimizing the number of required spares through risk assessment and criticality analysis.

Actual benefits realized by the customer company:
–        Better prediction of failures through a holistic condition monitoring program allowing better planning of outages and optimizing of maintenance activities.
–        Less need for maintenance inventory in parts. (Stock value less than 2% of Replacement Asset Value RAV).
–        Huge savings in maintenance cost and maintenance inventory values (22 MM USD Twnety two million USD in the first year alone (28% of maintenance cost))

Case Study 2: Precision Alignment – Petrochemical Company – water treatment unit
Customer observed repeated premature failure in motor / pump bearings and bearing seals.

SKF Reliability systems were asked to investigate and the investigation led to the following findings:

1. Average lifetime of bearings according to expected manufacturer lifetime expectations is 3 years; average lifetime of bearings on site was less than 1 year.
2. The patterns of wear on the seals were non-uniform and directional.
3. Power consumption rates for drive motors were higher than normal.

The conclusion was that the drive motors and the pumps required precision alignment.

After completion of the alignment for all motors and pumps the following results were achieved:
1 – Bearing lifetimes approached manufacturer expectations and increased by over 180% of previous condition; also wear in seals was significantly decreased.
2 – Downtime due to maintenance was decreased significantly.
3 – Power consumption was reduced by 10% for motors; in essence the savings on power consumption alone paid for the annual maintenance requirements of the motors and pumps.