SKF REP - Enhancing Machine Performance While Making Businesses More Sustainable

Sumit Mitra, Director for Industrial Business, SKF India

Sumit Mitra, Director for Industrial Business, SKF India

The industrial world is changing. And as new challenges emerge, industries are all looking for ways to enhance machine performance, while lowering operational and maintenance costs. Getting the right performance from rotating equipment can help meet business objectives and give a competitive edge. But the right performance is different for every customer.

In today’s competitive business environment, businesses need to maximize their revenues and control costs. For manufacturing companies, apart from the usual focus on productivity, efficiency, and quality, equipment availability, together with increased machine reliability, plays a critical part in achieving these objectives.

Digitalization and technology developments are also fast becoming key industrial strategic drivers. The Internet of Things (IoT) is connecting machines, while Big Data is offering new insights into machine performance and opportunities to drive efficiencies. SKF is leading the way with digitally enabled solutions built on years of machine and application knowledge.

Rotating Equipment Performance (REP)
Everyone knows SKF as a bearings company. But, over the years, SKF has acquired and developed capabilities that extend far beyond bearings. SKF is the only bearings company, which apart from bearings has seals, lubrication systems, housings and condition monitoring offerings in its portfolio of offerings.

For many years SKF has been selling these products separately and has delivered tremendous value to its customers. It are among the global leaders for each of these product categories individually.

But the global bearings manufacturer has gone one step further. It has started combining its multiple products and engineering capabilities through a unique offer known as Rotating Equipment Performance.

Instead of selling a product, they are now focusing on helping the customers solve their core needs of increased machine reliability and availability. Through REP, SKF focuses on improving the equipment MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) and decrease downtime and maintenance costs. In short, it increases its customer’s Overall Equipment Efficiency (OEE).

In one use case, SKF assisted a leading cement company based in Chennai, India, ensured an increase in MTBF from 6 months to 24 months for one of their grinding mills. It ensured zero surprise failures and increased machine availability through our Rotating Equipment Performance (REP) model.

REP – Enabling Improvement Of Our Customers’ Sustainability Performance
SKF has always been a leader in sustainability. Apart from focusing on sustainability in its internal production and processes, SKF REP can enable the improvement of its customer’s sustainability performance in multiple dimensions.

1. Machine And Operator Safety
In industrial environments, despite taking precautions, accidents are a grim reality during maintenance operations. Unplanned maintenance increases this danger since the maintenance person needs to get the plant back in the process as soon as possible.

Monitoring critical plant and equipment performance enables a reduction in unplanned maintenance events, thereby reducing the associated safety risks to maintenance personnel.

Remote monitoring reduces the need for manual inspection and automatic lubrication systems eliminate the need for manual lubrication. Such solutions significantly reduce the risk to personnel, especially when the lubrication points are at heights or remote locations and exposed to adverse weather conditions.

2. Energy Efficiency
A bearing's primary function is to reduce friction. The right bearing selection along with the correct seals and lubricant and ensuring proper alignment will ensure reduced energy consumption of the equipment. Remember, in a plant with hundreds of equipment, every bit counts!

Most equipment also has many ancillary systems having fans, motors, pumps, etc. that keep running irrespective of whether the leading equipment is working or not. By increasing availability and eliminating unplanned stoppages, the overall energy consumption per unit of output is reduced.

3. Material Consumption Efficiency
Monitoring of equipment helps us know the health of the equipment, thereby eliminating the need for many “time based” repairs and replacement activities. Automatic lubrication systems ensure that the right quantity of lubricant is delivered to the rotating equipment eliminating over lubrication, prevalent across the industry. An optimum sealing and housing solution can enable significantly increased MTBF.

Reducing the consumption of spares and lubricants leads to an overall reduction in the cost of operations and contributes to lower environmental impact.

4. Improved Production Output And Waste Reduction
REP enables higher equipment output and increased efficiencies. Also, surprise failures are reduced, ensuring reduced rejections. We are currently working on an exciting new offering called Recondoil. Recondoil uses proprietary technology, enabling the used oil to be restored to its original level of cleanliness. This will eliminate or significantly reduce the need to dispose of the spent oil, which is the current industry practice and has a significant environmental impact. Similarly, remanufacturing of large bearings significantly increase the useful life of a bearing, which will help cut on the carbon emissions and costs of a new bearing. Remanufacturing is regularly used in safety critical industries such as aviation and railways.

How Does SKF’s Rotating Equipment Performance (REP) Work?
The unique aspect of SKF’s REP offering is that they do not just provide advice and sell the products. They stand by their solutions and have its skin in the game.

In a typical REP offering, the customer does not need to invest in any components, monitoring hardware, or services upfront. SKF will enter into a fee-based performance contract with clearly defined KPI’s. These contracts will be tailored to each customer’s individual needs and may be at a single equipment level as detailed in the cement company example above or at a whole plant level as they have done for a rolling mill with a steel major in east India where we are paid based on per ton of steel produced, where we seek to increase the utilization rate from below 60 percent to above 90 percent over three years.

To summarise, the benefits of REP offerings are:
1. No upfront investment in CAPEX or MRO spares costs
2. Monthly and KPI based fees
3. Payout based on actual performance Solution is tailormade to your needs

Looking Ahead
Performance demands are different for every business. But, with rotating equipment the ultimate objective is to maximise the reliability and output from your machinery and your production process, whilst driving down the total cost of ownership over the life cycle. With experience from almost every industrial sector and machine type, SKF intends to work closely with the customer throughout a machine’s complete life cycle, using our knowledge, experience and insight to provide improved equipment design specications, as well as the high quality products, services, and advice required to help you meet your business objectives.

Looking ahead, we at SKF believe we will experience a sea change in the area of plant reliability. The advent of digitalization and AI will change the way we monitor our assets and plan their repairs and maintenance. The trend of the product as a service will accelerate. Companies will need to deliver to the customer by partnering with them for their plant reliability requirements and continuously providing value.

The future is reliable, digital, and sustainable.
At SKF we would like to summarize what we can do for our customers in just three simple words – ZERO SURPRISE FAILURES.