“Our aim for Spot is that, at the moment, we don’t have preventive or proactive maintenance routines on night shifts and the weekends. And, also, our labor force has to spend a lot of time, recording data rather than analyzing it… Spot can do this for us.

We come in the mornings. We already have reports generated. We know what’s happened on the plant, and then we can proactively fix those issues rather than spending eight hours trying to find them.”

Andy White, Seattle Plant Manager
More on CRH and Spot

TRANSCRIPT

Nelson Martinez, Reliability Engineer: Spot is able to reach areas that are difficult for human beings. Areas that could have risks to them, like high temperature areas that we have in our process. He has already a bundle of sensors which human beings don’t have.

Andy White, Seattle Plant Manager: Ash Grove is one of the leading cement producers in America. Almost 100 years, so the facility has been here for almost 100 years. We’ve got good, high quality staff. Now we really want to utilize those staff, better utilize those staff to do more important things than walking around the factory with instruments.

Martinez: My day to day is a combination of either processes, keeping up with numbers as well as taking a look at how our assets are performing. So they keep producing the cement that we need to sell to our customers.

Roxanna Ionescu, Maintenance Manager: We are trying to fix all the equipment to ensure the production for 24/7. So I’m leading a department from reliability, electrical, mechanical, and we are trying to fix the equipment or to prevent any failures.

Kelly Agley, Reliability Superintendent: We try to avoid unplanned shutdowns by finding data in vibration analysis, temperature trends, operational data from the computer systems.

White: So as a management team, we got together thinking about what we can do to take the plant to the next generation. We started looking on the internet, benchmarking with other industries, and we found that quadruped robotics existed with highly sophisticated instrumentation. And what led us to Boston Dynamics is that they are the world leader in mobile robotics. So we went and started talking to Boston Dynamics and fit was perfect.

Ionescu: So Spot is going to do a lot of rounds. Going to bring us also vibration, air leaks. Going to give us thermal camera. We have high temperature, high noise, difficult access.

Spot will help us with that. He will measure the temperature for us. He will just give us the data and it will help us prioritize. Hey, this is a problem.

White: Our aim for Spot is that, at the moment, we don’t have preventive or proactive maintenance routines on night shifts and on weekends. And also, our labor force has spent a lot of time recording data rather than analyzing it. So the idea is with Spot is that Spot can do this for us.

We come in the mornings, we already have reports generated. We know what’s happened on the plant, and then we can proactively fix those issues rather than spending eight hours trying to find them.

Ionescu: Now that Spot is deployed, we are adding more and more inspection everywhere.

White: The fact that we can improve the reliability of the plant, that will automatically generate ROI, reduce power consumption, reduced energy consumption. The fact that we can free up people’s time to become better skilled, upskill people to analyze the data more. So we know there’s a huge ROI for Spot.

Ionescu: We just want to ensure that our people are spending their time in the best way possible. Spot is a huge asset for the team. He’s giving us information day and night, bringing us data and helping us monitor the equipment.

White: So CRH is very forward thinking. They know the people in the company has got a lot of very good ideas, how to bring the company forward for the future. So the Innovation Fund was set up, to try and help those ideas. Once people knew that we’d won money from the Innovation Fund for CRH Innovation Fund, people became really excited. Motivation increased. People are excited to to see Spot on the plant and to work with it. So it’s going to be an amazing experience for the whole plant.

That will also increase the motivation, safety improvements. I mean, there’s so many things, ideas we’ve got for Spot. Part of the Innovation Fund’s scope was the scalability of Spot. And so once Spot is successful at the Seattle Plant, we can roll it out across the other 12 plants in America.