Meridium addresses asset performance niche for Equistar
Staff -- Manufacturing Business Technology, 12/1/2003 12:00:00 AM
As part of an enterprisewide initiative, Houston-based Equistar Chemicals sought to reduce maintenance expenses by $8.5 million per year at its 16 manufacturing facilities throughout the country. However, reliability engineers for this chemicals and polymers manufacturer immediately came up against a roadblock that is all too familiar for companies involved in integration projects: how to piece together asset-related data from a hodgepodge of systems throughout the enterprise.
Meridium provided the answer through its Asset Performance Management software, which allows viewing and working with asset data in a common format. The package also includes a set of statistical tools for analyzing the data; and asset improvement methodologies, such as reliability-centered maintenance, risk-based inspection, and others.
Bonz Hart, Meridium's president and founder, stresses that an asset performance management system isn't the same thing as an enterprise asset management system, which manages assets; or a plant historian, which holds process-level data. "We don't do the transactions. Software from Honeywell, OSIsoft, and other vendors provides the discrete data on performance. We pull that data together to give you the ability to understand it," says Hart. "To use the financial analogy, we're kind of like Morningstar, where you're watching over your mutual funds and getting alerts on issues that are showing up."
Hart founded Meridium 10 years ago and worked initially with Mobil and Alcoa to develop the Asset Performance Management applications. The company has its greatest strength in the asset-intensive process industries—such as chemicals, hydrocarbon processing, and power generation—where even small improvements in asset reliability can yield major benefits. Hart says the company also is looking at possibilities in asset-intensive discrete industries.
