About FLSmidth
Since 1882, FLSmidth has been providing innovative engineering, equipment, and service solutions to the global mining and cement industries, so their customers can improve operational performance, thereby reducing costs and environmental impact. With the belief that even a small discovery can lead to great potential, the company has used their experience, expertise, and passion to change the rules for processing natural resources to help create the world we live in today. Additionally, FLSmidth is committed to building a sustainable future and plays a key role in delivering sustainable productivity to the mining and cement industries through their MissionZero initiative, which is designed to enable their customers to move toward zero emission by 2030. The company aims to achieve this goal by embracing advanced technology, digital solutions, and strong partnerships. Today, FLSmidth provides their customers with increased output and quality, reduced total cost of ownership (TCO), and optimized productivity, which they refer to as Sustainable Productivity.
Project Summary
FLSmidth has various worldwide Monitoring Control Centers from which its teams can remotely and centrally monitor the asset health of its global Mining and Cement customers. Therefore, the company was primarily looking for a solution to help them monitor their customers’ assets and to provide event alerts and notifications to their Monitoring Control Centers for the purpose of avoiding downtime and increasing sustainable and profitable uptime. In addition, the company was seeking a ready-made system that would be easy to configure and maintain and that could generate operational reports that would provide insights into the health of their customers’ assets. Specifically, they wanted the generation of two types of reports: event reports for emergencies that could be immediately communicated to the customer and periodic KPI reports. It was also important to FLSmidth that the solution fit into their technology stack, which is mainly based on Microsoft technology. The company chose ICONICS since it develops IoT and cloud-ready solutions that take maximum advantage of Microsoft’s Azure cloud services to provide global visibility, scalability, and reliability and that therefore nicely fit into their technology stack.
ICONICS Software Deployed
Realized Benefits
FLSmidth saw significant benefits after deploying the ICONICS software. The company was able to visualize their customers’ assets through remote monitoring and in turn remotely support and troubleshoot their customers’ operations to manage asset alerts and notifications. This remote monitoring resulted in reduced downtime and increased uptime and asset life. For example, through an ICONICS dashboard, the company was able to identify an oil leak in one of their customer’s crushers and to prevent significant downtime of this asset. FLSmidth was also able to contribute to their own sustainability goals for their customers. The capacity for remote monitoring, support, and troubleshooting results in decreased operational energy consumption and carbon footprint, thus leading to a substantial positive sustainability impact. Additionally, ICONICS’ seamless integration to the Azure platform makes it highly scalable and reliable. FLSmidth leverages GraphWorX64 to create dashboards that are used by their teams to monitor the various metrics. A few of the metrics/KPIs monitored include specific power consumption, hydraulic oil moisture content, false air detection in mill circuits, and hydraulic system oil leaks. In addition, alarm limits trigger emails to be sent to the monitoring teams allowing them to respond accordingly. Since the teams have access to the trend values of the various signals on the dashboards, they can analyze these trends and reach out to the customer if required. FLSmidth also uses AlarmWorX64 and ReportWorX64 to generate periodic reports that are delivered automatically to their customers.
Conclusion
ICONICS plays a critical and compelling role with respect to FLSmidth’s ability to remotely monitor their customers’ assets. This capability allows the company to assess the performance of their customers’ assets and generate reports that outline these results. FLSmidth is planning to extend the use of ICONICS Hyper Alarming to further extend this monitoring capability. In addition to the everimproving IoT connectivity, the company plans to scale out their monitoring from 230 plants to approximately 400 plants with about ten thousand assets.
The ICONICS Suite is a critical application in our portfolio regarding the health of our customers’ assets. We use ICONICS solutions in our Monitoring Center to monitor and report on potential failures in our customers’ assets which in turn allows us to quickly respond and fix any problem.
Text taken over from original – ICONICS
