Monsanto engineers used the full capabilities of HART Communication to “get connected” and integrate the intelligent information from more than 600 HART-enabled devices into their control systems, CMMS (SAP) and daily work processes. Using the intelligent device information significantly reduced costs and improved plant operations as it enabled the transition from reactive to proactive and predictive maintenance.

By implementing conditioned based monitoring techniques, they can effectively identify, diagnose, troubleshoot, and ultimately repair issues prior to their effects negatively impacting production. As a result, they were able to identify the bad actors (devices) and save the operation between $800 thousand and $1.6 million dollars in cost avoidance per year through their reliability program efforts.

According to Joel Holmes, site reliability engineer, HART Communication helped them realize benefits and savings throughout plant operations:

• Embraced the asset optimization process in assigning criticality measures to over 14,000 pieces of equipment and instrumentation encompassing the plant. 
• Incorporated an asset management system into their site reliability workflow practices, to leverage and share reliability results and document return on investment (ROI).
• Analyzed their data to quantify predictive versus reactive work by generating a “bad actor” list that shows how much “cost avoidance” the reliability program is providing.

HART-enabled devices (measurement devices and smart valve positioners) are at the core of this achievement. Joel considers the asset management system to be a smart handheld on steroids!. Now, management is asking the reliability group to identify what we want to do next.