Achieving A Proactive Maintenance Culture and Increasing Plant Reliability

Partnership Turns Reactive Culture to a Proactive Culture

Worthington Steel and AssetWatch (formerly Nikola Labs) partnered in 2018 with a vision to eliminate unplanned downtime for the global metals manufacturing company founded in 1955. Jeremie Lieb, Maintenance Agile Team Lead for Worthington Steel knew that to achieve this they would need a solid strategy.  

Following the blueprint of its five-stage Reliability Triangle, with the ultimate goal to achieve operational excellence and a target of 100% machine reliability, Worthington Steel first established and executed a planned maintenance strategy. This important base step offered the benefits of increased productivity of tradespeople, less maintenance rework, fewer spare parts holdings, improved safety and increased profitability.

“It’s the opposite of a reactive maintenance strategy,” said Jeremie Lieb, Maintenance Agile Team Lead for Worthington Steel steel processing division. “Once the planned maintenance strategy was operating, we saw improvements — but the next step, proactive maintenance, based on predictive maintenance and condition-based monitoring, would be where significant gains would be realized.”

Choosing The Right Partner 

 Condition monitoring of machine health was historically delivered through one of two options: manual inspections that were labor intensive, exposed workers to hazardous environments and missed failures between readings, or hard-wired solutions that required complicated engineering, IT integration and significant capital expenditure. With either method, there was a further question of who would analyze the data.

After a search for a collaborator that could drive innovation, Worthington Steel partnered with AssetWatch, a Columbus-based start-up with a novel remote, sensor-based condition-monitoring solution called Vero®.

Test Before You Invest

Worthington Steel was the first to trial Vero® wireless IoT sensors in November 2018 at their Columbus, Ohio Steel facility. The feedback was invaluable to the engineers at AssetWatch and resulted in adding the expertise of dedicated Condition Monitoring Engineers who, supported by machine learning, now analyze the vibration data and issue prescriptive maintenance recommendations for every AssetWatch customer.  

This all-inclusive 30-day, risk-free trial is available to all who are interested in testing before investing. AssetWatch will install a complete wireless sensor network and monitor 50 of your critical machine assets for just $199. It’s easy to get started, just book a demo.

Blog Author: Michael Bernhard

Michael is a Senior Solutions Architect at AssetWatch. As a previous MMA fighter and personal trainer, he knows how to bring the hard work and dedication to our manufacturing partners to help them reduce maintenance costs and improve asset reliability.

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