Asset maintenance knowledge shared using Remote Diagnostic Centre & Solution Factory Concept

SKF have over 100 years’ experience working with OEM’s and End-user’s of Rotating equipment and have a lot to offer when it comes to maintenance, maintenance improvement and asset improvement.

The PIF team had the opportunity to interview SKF’s Solution Factory Manager at the Plant & Asset Maintenance show back in April 2014 about the innovative products & systems they were show-casing.
SKF are all about sharing and integrating Global knowledge and experience to allow them to offer more value to their OEM’s and end-user’s.

SKF Remote Diagnostic Centre

SKF’s Remote Monitoring Service makes it possible for any company with Internet access to implement a world-class predictive maintenance (PdM) programme for periodic or continuous monitoring of critical machinery.

Organisations worldwide can benefit from accessing SKF’s global knowledge on vibration analysis and can download and send vibration data via the SKG one global cloud to the approbation vibration engineers & segment specialists, wherever they are in the world.

Who can really benefit from SKF’s Remote Diagnostic Centre?

Access to SKF’s Remote Diagnostic Centre can really benefit applications, such as the following:

• Plants with limited staff trained in predictive maintenance techniques
• operations with sites located remotely from a central facility
• original equipment manufacturers that desire to provide a value-added service to their customers

Benefits of the SKF Remote Diagnostic Centre include; Capital investment cost savings, increased data integrity, expert SKF analysis and recommendations and global, 24/7 access to reports and data.

The Solution Factory Concept

SKF has set up an infrastructure of knowledge centres around the world called SKF Solution Factory. At each SKF Solution Factory, customers can gain access to a wide range of SKF knowledge & experience, including:

• Remanufacturing and customisation.
• Application engineering.
• Spindle repair.
•  Lubrication applications.
•  Mechanical services including mounting, alignment and balancing.
• Remote monitoring centre and training.

The representation of such a wide range of knowledge & expertise at each of the centres make it much easier to deliver the best solution out there for the customer. The Solution Factory Concept allows SKF to offer the same level of expertise to any client within any segment in any region. The centres make it easy to replicate already proven solution or services, into similar industries & applications around the world.

Example of how the SKF Solution Factory Concept delivers value to end-user

A major steelworks in Germany had a breakdown caused by a bearing failure due to lack of lubrication in one of their processing machines. As new bearings were not available on the market, the customer had to find a quick solution to bring the mill back to full operation and at the same time find a reliable solution to avoid similar failures in the future.
The company turned to SKF. The bearings, the largest being a double row tapered roller bearing with an outside diameter of around 1.3 m and a weight of more than 2,000 kg, were sent to SKF for analysis and repair and then reinstalled in the machine. In total the refurbishment and replacement of the reworked bearings saved the customer one month of downtime and consequently avoided a huge production loss. To prevent such a sudden breakdown in the future, engineers at the SKF Solution Factory in Schweinfurt received the assignment to customize and install an SKF condition monitoring online system, collecting and storing data so that both the customer and SKF’s diagnostic experts could observe and analyze the data and be warned before failures occur.