From Healthcare to Industrial Care: Kemira’s Revolutionary Approach to Asset Management

Just as modern healthcare has shifted from treating illnesses to preventing them, Kemira is revolutionizing industrial maintenance by treating its rotating assets like a population of patients. The secret? Treating equipment failure is not as inevitable, but as entirely preventable.

Text: Mia Heiskanen, Aki Karuveha

Through an innovative partnership with Asensiot Oy, the global chemical company has developed a groundbreaking preventive approach that’s already delivered a sevenfold return on investment across ten production sites.

“In safety, every accident is preventable. Yet, when it comes to rotating assets, we still accept failures as inevitable. Why are we willing to tolerate risks that we know can be eliminated? OEE (Overall Equipment Efficiency) can track performance but misses hidden risks, so we needed new metrics in risk assessment,” begins Carl Bristow, Director of Safety & Manufacturing Excellence at Kemira Oyj, a global chemical company.

Kemira operates over 60 production facilities worldwide, but previously lacked a comprehensive, real-time overview of the true condition of its rotating equipment, an essential requirement for enabling a new, more sustainable maintenance strategy. Traditional condition monitoring practices focus mainly on critical assets, leaving the overall picture of asset health incomplete.

To improve data-driven management, Kemira launched a collaboration project with Asensiot Oy, a Finnish Value-as-a-Service company, in 2021. The goal was to create a new, scalable operating model that would support Kemira’s sustainable maintenance goals, motivate field personnel, and allow for easy and rapid implementation from one plant to another. This approach aimed to quickly identify concrete cases to achieve Kemira’s strategic objectives.

“Just as healthcare focuses on proactive care for large populations, we decided to bring the same large-scale preventive approach to Kemira’s rotating assets. Yet, in industry, the focus is often on scheduling repairs, even though much of the risk of unplanned failures can be minimized by taking proactive actions to address fault progression at an early stage,” says Aki Karuveha, CEO of Asensiot Oy, a MyAsensiot Condition Screening® company.

By partnering with Asensiot, Kemira developed a new collaboration model with key metrics that provide proactive, actionable information on rotating assets in a structured format, integrated directly into Kemira’s SAP/HANA system. This enables early detection of potential issues, supports optimized maintenance planning, and reduces the number of corrective interventions required over the long term. It also streamlines maintenance actions, ensuring resources are focused on assets that truly need attention-minimizing unnecessary work and supporting the company’s sustainability and operational excellence goals.

From Vision to Reality: A Scalable Solution

“At first, we wanted to understand what kind of data we should collect and how this could be done efficiently, using available measurement technologies and without requiring special skills at our sites,” says Bristow.

At one of Kemira’s plants, a range of measurement technology tests revealed that wireless technology did not provide a cost-effective solution for achieving a comprehensive overview of asset condition at scale. On the initiative of Kemira’s field personnel, a pilot was launched using an operating model where relevant data is collected quickly and easily with a route collector during existing monthly inspection rounds. RFID technology ensures that data is always measured for the correct asset and later enabled field observations and asset-specific information to be accessed via mobile devices.

“We want our field personnel at production sites to be engaged in the process. Regular route routines and field observations support the development of our safety culture. So monthly measurement routine is much more than only focusing on data,” adds Bristow.

The ability of in-house personnel to conduct measurements provides exceptional flexibility, especially for monitoring batch processes, and enables rapid response when a change in asset performance is suspected. Additionally, quickly verifying asset condition after maintenance helps prevent failures that could arise from potential installation or assembly errors.

At Kemira’s production sites, comprehensive measurements are routinely performed once a month and more frequently if needed with the collected data uploaded to the supplier’s cloud service. The volume of transferred data is optimized, ensuring that only essential, standardized raw signals are sent for processing by artificial intelligence algorithms to pinpoint focus areas.

“We need actionable information integrated into our work order process, not just alarms. It was clear to us that technology alone would not support our sustainable maintenance goals,” highlights Carl Bristow.

Insights into Impact

In Kemira’s new condition screening operating model, only essential action-guiding, standardized non-routine notifications are generated for SAP/HANA, thanks to a scalable AI-algorithm-based screening and expert validation process. This allows Kemira to focus solely on what matters, maintenance actions that truly make an impact.

At the core of this new approach are the people in the field and supporting their daily work. User motivation stems from information that makes their work easier-most importantly, by identifying concrete cases where users can see the direct link between actionable guidance and real impact. Without impact, there is no value.

Following a successful pilot, the new operating model was rolled out to 10 production sites in different countries during 2023 (Wave 1). The deployment of monthly monitoring was straightforward and required no prior site-specific information. For a two-person team, the total fieldwork amounted to just around 14 days. In 2024, Kemira implemented the system at 16 additional production sites (Wave 2).

“Sustainable reliability is not just monitoring critical assets or avoiding unplanned shutdowns by scheduling repairs; its true impact at scale lies in extending asset lifetime and avoiding unnecessary maintenance actions to reduce overall risk of unplanned repairs,” explains Aki Karuveha.

Kemira’s Wave 1 Statistics

Wave 1: 10 Sites (Results from November 2023 Onward)

Deployment Time: 14 Days On-Site / 2 Persons

Measured: 779 Individual Assets

Extended Asset Lifetime: 14 Realized Cases

Avoided Unplanned Shutdowns: 45 Realized Cases

Estimated Costs Avoided: €2,264,000 (~7x ROI)

The Numbers Speak

“Kemira has achieved multiple benefits by adopting a sustainable reliability approach to rotating assets, including increased equipment uptime, reduced maintenance costs, decreased manpower requirements, improved energy efficiency, and a smaller ecological footprint,” summarizes Bristow.

Condition screening provides a comprehensive monthly overview of the health of rotating assets, delivering an extensive situational picture that seamlessly integrates with Kemira’s Asset Performance Management (APM) in SAP/HANA. Without a realistic picture of asset health, APM becomes ineffective, leading to poor decision-making, missed optimization opportunities, increased risks, and fragmented processes. Accurate asset health data is essential for APM to improve reliability, reduce costs, and enhance efficiency.

Kemira is continuously improving communication by linking SAP/HANA with the supplier, enabling tracking of maintenance actions and their impact on resolving flagged issues, and supporting efficient, active collaboration between Kemira and Asensiot.

Example Cases

Portugal Plant: After nearly two years using the Asensiot system (even without the SAP PM module), the plant has managed maintenance more effectively, detecting issues early, reporting actions, and demonstrating positive results through readings. Data-driven predictive maintenance has reduced downtime and costs compared to traditional methods.

Impact of Fault Detection on Corrective Actions and Risk Mitigation. This figure illustrates how timely fault detection enables effective corrective actions, such as the replacement of faulty components or the reduction of loading conditions. These interventions significantly decrease the risk of catastrophic machine failure by addressing issues before escalation, thereby improving operational reliability and extending equipment lifespan.

Importance of Early Detection of Excessive Bearing Friction for Proactive Maintenance. This figure demonstrates how early identification of excessive friction within bearings enables proactive interventions, such as relubrication or adjustment. Detecting abnormal friction is crucial for preventing fault progression that could otherwise result in severe and costly machine failures. Early action not only safeguards equipment integrity but also minimizes risk for unplanned downtime and higher maintenance costs.

Summary:
Kemira’s proactive, data-driven approach to rotating asset risk assessment is delivering tangible benefits across its global operations. By focusing on early detection, actionable insights, and scalable processes, Kemira is setting a new benchmark for sustainable reliability and maintenance excellence in the process industry.