In our latest podcast, host Mike Abare speaks with Magnum Systems applications engineer Ben Adwell, whose breadth of experience in plant operations has evolved from chemical to process engineering, culminating as a maintenance manager in the oil recycling sector. Joining Magnum Systems, Ben brings with him a profound, field-oriented insight into optimizing process design and maintenance for elevated efficiency and safety. This episode looks at the value of planning for scalability, the significance of comprehensive and reliable data collection for process optimization, and the criticality of equipment reliability. Ben highlights the importance of predictive maintenance and shares pragmatic strategies for mitigating emergency failures. From Magnum Systems' role as an industry integrator to adopting advanced automation and AI, this engaging discussion uncovers the many opportunities technology brings to bulk material handling. This episode is full of practical wisdom, showcasing the future of plant operations while highlighting the invaluable perspective Ben Adwell brings to the Magnum family.
Transcript
Mike Abare:
Welcome to Magnum Systems Podcast, where we'll aim to dive deep into the world of A for Automate, I for Integrate, and M for Manufacturer, I'm your host, Mike Abare, and I'll be bringing you expert interviews, thought-provoking discussions and real-world case studies that shed light on the latest trends and developments in systems integration. Whether you're a seasoned professional who's seen it all or just curious about manufacturers who are revolutionizing their operations, this podcast is your one-source resource. So sit back and relax as we aim to cover all the challenges automation and integration are solving today. Let's do this.
Hello everybody. Today, I'm sitting with Ben Adwell. Ben's going to talk to us today about the maintenance and serviceability associated with equipment and various plants, whether that's pneumatic, conveying, mechanical conveying or other forms of applications inside of industrial plants. Ben, would you take a moment to share a little bit about yourself, who Ben Adwell is?
Ben Adwell:
Thank you, Mike. I appreciate that. I studied chemical engineering, and a secondary major in biological engineering at Kansas State, and graduating in 2011. Right after that, I took a job with a cement manufacturer and was there for about six years as a process engineer. And then I took a job as a process/production engineer with a chemical manufacturer and spent another five, almost six years there as well. And then I was fortunate enough to take a job as a maintenance manager for an oil recycling refinery, and had been doing that for a couple of years before I joined the Magnum team. So my experience has largely always been in the plant and being that guy with boots on the ground, and I have that perspective and that understanding.
Mike Abare:
Thank you for sharing. And certainly, I think that's part of this topic today, is your experience, your perspective being on the customer side, if you will, that's a value-added benefit for Magnum because we start getting different perspectives than just what we are as an integrator, as a manufacturer of many of our brands. So with your history of being in a plant personnel scenario, what do you value most when it comes to projects and project design, project execution down the line of what a successful project is?
Ben Adwell:
So a kind of twofold answer to that. So from a production engineer and production manager role, I looked at and valued the planning for future growth. As we know, you always want to get more output from your processes. We always want that. We want more output for increased sales, increased capacity and getting good data to analyze and optimize the processes in the future. We want to make sure that we're acting as efficiently as possible. And then, from the maintenance side of view, I really found myself going back to these three core things: reliability, serviceability and, in a sense, redundancy. What I mean by that is having additional equipment on standby to allow you to do service on one piece of equipment without taking the process down. And that ties back to the production view. I could really go on about this.
I had so many operations that I managed in the past that we had to shut the facility down to do maintenance on equipment. And I learned, time and time again, after having to suffer the casualties, you could say in a sense, of the process having to shut down and the delays in downtime and the associated costs with that, that it was far better to take the equipment down early when it was not a big issue, rather than waiting until it would be a catastrophic issue and come down. The equipment's going to shut down at some point, so it's better for you to decide that. It's a lot cheaper, in a sense. So I think with all the things that I would do in my projects, I would always kind of plan for those. I know that these things are going to wear out. Everything has a service life, so how can I make this least impactful to the process?
So if I can add an extra port here or an additional valve here, something to allow isolation so I can take this offline, those things are valuable assets to have.
Mike Abare:
When you were evaluating projects, even before you get to the implementation stage, and I'm sure that was probably different as a plant engineer versus the maintenance man, as you started evaluating projects, were there certain things that you were looking for from that supplier or that manufacturer that would put them head and shoulders above the competition? Or what were those pitfalls or kind of gotchas when you were looking at proposals and drawings or whatever as part of that design and development phase of a project?
Ben Adwell:
Many of the times I met with service providers or vendors for things, I always had a meeting, always had to have that initial meeting, the discovery meeting with everyone, and that's where they would ask so many great questions. And I love that we do that as well, but I ask so many questions of them too, looking for the backend resources they have, what their capabilities are, talking about the other services they offer too. I can't tell you how many times I went to a vendor's facility and saw they have this equipment, work on it, or provide this service here that no one had known about. Knowing what they have available to them - I think that's what Magnum does.
Mike Abare:
And you mentioned reliability. Certainly, that's something, in my opinion, every manufacturer needs to be looking at is how robust and how reliable. Did they use the right equipment for that application? So certainly, I know that invariably has to be a major discussion point and understand the customer's product. Magnum certainly being the experts in powder flake pellets and seed, that's important that we have our data, but we also know that customers have proprietary products, and so what we think might be something we've handled before could be uniquely different just because of the proprietary nature of whatever that product is. So as we start getting into the serviceability, you talked about data collection. What's that data you're after from a plant perspective?
Ben Adwell:
Many times, it's manual gauges, manual temperature indication out in the field, and it takes somebody to go out there and physically check. And then, of course, when you get out there, sometimes it's broken, and you had no idea until you go and check it. So if you've replaced those with digital indication, getting feedback into your HMI or the control room so those guys can see it. You can set up alarms and things like that so you can identify issues sooner. That is invaluable time. Also, with all the additional indications, I use that data to troubleshoot the processes. Unfortunately, if there's an upset event in the facility or in the process itself, I would use that historian data that we had been saving for so long, and use to build trends of the process overall and use that to identify, hey, you know what instigated this. This is the chain of events that led to this event down the line. And use that for safety and process efficiency.
You can use that information for anything. You use that indication IO to put into your automated processes so you can remove some of the manual operations from your guys in the field. But on the maintenance side of things, there are so many data points that you can use to predict future failures of equipment and I think that's where, ultimately, I found interest in predicting that and preventing that because I hate emergency failures, and I don't want to have to get up in the middle of the night and go to the plant and try to figure out what's going on. If I can prevent that or plan ahead, that's time saved, money saved and all this stuff. I can't tell you how many times I've gotten calls in the middle of the night because of a pump or motor failure. And that's just as simple as getting some vibration monitoring on a bearing temperature data on a pump. It's overheating, things like that, things that some places may have some, many places don't.
I know that adding those things is a cost, but alternatively, the cost of that downtime and equipment failure is usually far more than the cost of the indication addition. So I always try to implement that upfront. And if I can suggest it here with Magnum to so many of our customer's projects, I would love to do that. It's like, I get it. I want to make this as easy for you guys. If I can help you with that, that's what I'd like to do.
Mike Abare:
Whether you're the plant engineer or the maintenance manager, the various roles you had, were there criteria that would allow a project to move through the systems faster? In my experience, ROI is a big driving decision-maker when it comes to a project. Safety obviously has become a bigger piece of projects these days. Are there other factors that you as a plant would look at to say, "This is what the driving factors are to move a project forward"
Ben Adwell:
Exactly what you said. I really think those are the two main things. It's the safety, absolutely. If there's anything that's unsafe, you need to fix it. ROI is the ultimate defining characteristic. Yeah, what's our payback period on this? And what other incentives are there to do this project, like future expansions?
Mike Abare:
So then let's go into the intangibles because does that get talked about at the plant decision-making process? Because I use the example, somebody's lugging 50-pound bag and they're lifting two 50-pound bags every minute trying to break them open and put them in a hand dump station, or maybe it's the palletizing side or whatever the process is, do intangibles like work comp and other things come into your decision factors, or are those glossed over and not considered?
Ben Adwell:
If I can place my equipment in areas that allow access, or if I can add in an overhead beam to allow them to put a hoist or something overhead to move it safely, I will fight for that. I don't want anybody to get hurt. Ultimately, the people are what we really, really care about.
Mike Abare:
So continue down some of the decision process making. As a maintenance manager, depending on that employer, you may have more pull than other employers that have that job. How do you navigate through the different layers of decision-making? How does a company like Magnum work with that plant production, maintenance, and engineer to drive that across the different levels of management that are part of that decision making?
Ben Adwell:
We're identifying who is the decision maker within that company, so you're going to have to use that plant point contact as the liaison for that. So asking those questions, "What can I do to help you justify this? What do you need? What information do you need from us?" Always being available for that, being open to dialogue. And that's where it really comes to, is that dialogue. We need to have those discussions on the whole process and understand that information. I think they give us one small snapshot of the process they want us to focus on, but really, we kind of need the information on the outside on the end, both ends of it. Where's it coming from? And where's it going after that? That will help us define that information, as well as personnel. Yeah, how many personnel do you have? Who's going to be doing this? Is it one shift? Is it 24 hours, continuous as a batch? That's the information we need to know because we can use all the information we get from to help justify anything we need to provide for them.
Mike Abare:
So from your background as a process and production engineer, and certainly as a maintenance manager, what do you bring to Magnum's systems to the team here that will help Magnum better understand the end user's perspective and certainly how we approach things?
Ben Adwell:
So support after the sale, getting constant feedback. I think that's where we do better or improve on things feedback from them feedback from them after long after they've made the sale. I want to know, have you guys had to do anything different? Have you guys added anything to it? Following back with them? I think that's where we could get more insight to better our future projects with the customer with the things they're struggling with.
Mike Abare:
And that's so critical. I know that from my experience in sales. The customer doesn't want to see the salesperson only when there's a project, also wants to see the salesperson when there's nothing going on and just checking in, and like you said, adding to that trusted resource category of "Hey, here's my other product lines," or "Here's what I do," or "Hey, what's going on with your system?" And I think that's really the key these days, is asking those critical questions instead of hitting the superficial top of it, more of the report side and never getting into the system and how well it's performing or competitor's system or somebody else's equipment, or another process in the plant that we've not been exposed to.
Ben Adwell:
Definitely attest to that. Definitely did that. They would give me that information. And then sometimes I would call them to give me expertise on something completely different. Maybe they have knowledge in this other area, which would lead to more projects and improvements for the facility, and I think that's where we can go too. I know that Magnum is planning on expanding and future growth and broadening our capabilities, and we will be that going forward. And that's so exciting about it.
Mike Abare:
You're fairly new to the Magnum team, and we're drawing on your expertise in the various roles that you've had in your career. What are the things that you saw coming to Magnum that made Magnum stand out? And what specifically were the things that stood out or separated us from other companies you might've considered?
Ben Adwell:
Two things really. So the first one, I think, is the absolute sheer amount of and availability of technical personnel. So much knowledge that's there in so many different roles. I think that's huge. There's not a lot of resources in my history that I've been able to pull from, so I would rely on the vendors, and Magnum has that. So, for me, in my perspective now, I can reach out to those people and get that information so I can help end customers. And we have guys that have been here 30-plus years or so, and they have a wealth of knowledge. That's one of the biggest things I saw coming in here, and it's just fantastic to be around that. Also that management within Magnum is so excited and forward-thinking. It's actually one of the biggest things that drew me to Magnum, was their plans for the future.
Mike Abare:
I can speak to that as well. It's very refreshing to see a company that says, "Yeah, we know we have some challenges. We know we have some areas that we can improve upon, and let's just not talk about it, but let's actually implement change, so that way we can create positive outcomes and drive efficiency, and all those things in our processes, which in turn help us to manage our cost and be more responsive to customers as their needs come up." It's a very refreshing topic for me as well. You mentioned all of that is where Magnum's going. And where do you see the most growth in the future when it comes to opportunities with customers in the bulk material handling industry?
Ben Adwell:
I think the largest amount of growth that we're going to see at this current time is automation. Technology is becoming easier to access, it's becoming increasingly advanced, and there are so many things that are out there. At these facilities, there's room for just getting up to spec on that, but then there's also moving forward, being on that cutting edge and bringing all that information in, and then using the available tools that are coming out, especially like AI and things like that. So I think that absolutely is where things are going to be going.
Mike Abare:
And certainly, in the economic environment we're in, automation has just been very critical. Because when you can't get people to show up for work, or you're only staffed at 60% because you can't pay people enough, or people don't want to work today or whatever the case may be, or as we mentioned earlier, I'm lifting 50-pound bags, and how quickly do I get burned out on lifting 50-pound bags? And so, we talked about ROI earlier, and so I think about automation. A robot, whether it's breaking that bag or palletizing that bag, frees up an employee per se, but now it changes it from a manual job into can that employee be retrained and take on a higher caliber job, because now I'm programming robots and I'm looking at other functions inside that are needed to maintain the automated system.
Ben, thank you for coming today. Thank you for sharing your experience from a different perspective than somebody who's been with Magnum or in this industry for a long time, sharing it from the end user perspective. And that's really valuable to us, and I think value to the listening audience here as well. So thank you for coming again today. We really appreciate your time.
Ben Adwell:
Yeah, thank you so much. I really had a good time.
Mike Abare:
And that's a wrap for this episode of AIM. Thanks for listening, and thanks for joining us today. If you have any questions or you would like to learn more about the topic we discussed today, feel free to reach out to us on our website or social media channels so you never miss an episode packed with valuable insights. Please join us next time as we continue to explore the ever evolving landscape of systems integration. Until then, keep aiming for success. This is my Mike Abare signing off. Good day.
