How does your organization analyze electrical asset safety and performance risks? Every industry relies on electrical asset performance, from manufacturing and hospitality to technology and food processing. Inherently, you may eventually face employee safety or equipment reliability challenges.
As a risk and safety manager, you have plenty on your plate. Yet the importance of a proactive approach to electrical asset safety cannot be ignored. Electrical issues can cause safety incidents and unplanned downtime, which can carry hefty costs for your business.
Infrared inspection is one of the most important aspects of any comprehensive asset management approach.
An effective infrared inspection will help you:
- Detect problems early in the failure cycle
- Enhance safety and reliability
- Avoid costly service interruptions
- Document energy savings
- Significantly reduce unscheduled power outages
- Minimize reactive maintenance and troubleshooting time
- Ensure OEM warranty protection
- Reduce insurance premiums
Infrared inspections can play a critical role in your electrical asset safety strategy, helping you avoid headaches, reduce costs, and save lives. Let’s dive in.
What is an Infrared Inspection?
Infrared inspections utilize non-invasive technology to identify excess heat and various electrical issues. Basically, infrared inspections can help you identify failures before they happen.
Every electrical asset can experience issues from wear and tear, manufacturer error, or improper training. Whatever the cause of underlying issues, it’s critical to find them before they impact your operation or people.
Some of the biggest issues an effective infrared inspection program can prevent:
- Electrical Fires
Heat is an immediate indicator of an asset experiencing electrical problems. While temperature increases due to heavy loads do occur, excessive loads — especially on damaged components — can lead to temperatures above maximum ratings. This puts your organization at risk of an electrical fire. - Equipment Damage
Control boards and other equipment that govern system operations are critical. The impact could be significant if just one goes down because of an electrical problem. The majority of manufacturers have experienced some sort of unplanned equipment downtime, leading to high costs and operational impact. - Insurance Spikes
Most insurance companies require annual or biannual electrical inspections, depending on facility type. For larger companies, these inspections will most likely require and keep insurance policies in place. In addition to avoiding incident-inducing premium increases, it’s also important to demonstrate that you’re taking proactive steps to protect your workers and keep equipment safe. This is where infrared inspections can make a big difference.
Going Above and Beyond with Inspection Technology
In this age of digital transformation and data-driven operations, efficiently managing your safety and reliability insights is more critical than ever before – this includes all processes related to your infrared inspections and management.
Quick access to important data is key to maintaining safety and uptime. Without it, productivity suffers, the risk of asset failure increases, operational costs rise, and the safety of your workers is put on the line.
That’s why SEAM Group created and provides ViewPoint, a simple, scalable technology platform that digitizes condition monitoring and safety data across multiple facilities and assets to enable better customer decision-making.
What is ViewPoint?
Serving as an intuitive interface that is thoughtfully laid out and easy to navigate – a “single pane of glass” view into your most critical performance data, ViewPoint gives you a clear line of sight into your most critical safety and reliability insights. This multi-disciplined platform digitizes condition monitoring and safety data across multiple facilities and assets to enable better decision-making.
The ViewPoint platform combines and analyzes data gathered from infrared, vibration, oil, ultrasound, and motor current testing, as well as safety services like arc flash hazards analysis and digital Lockout/Tagout programs. ViewPoint supports data management for one or hundreds of facilities and enables multiple users’ personalized access levels.