Reliability starts with optimizing what you already have

Insight from Verdantix shows that improving asset uptime remains a key operational priority, with 45% of respondents citing it as a focus area. Every hour of downtime affects production, maintenance costs and the ability to meet customer demand.

For many operations teams, the fastest path to higher output isn't building new capacity. It's reducing variability, eliminating bottlenecks and extracting more value from existing assets.

Implementing automation and digital technologies helps operators detect process deviations earlier, identify the cause of performance losses and respond before they affect production. With fewer disruptions, plants can increase throughput and improve efficiency without proportionally increasing energy use or operating costs.

Extracting more value from existing assets often includes modernizing the systems that support them. Upgrading aging automation infrastructure, for example, can improve reliability, reduce operational risk and help organizations maximize the return on investments. At 12 Repsol butane plants across Spain, legacy distributed control systems were upgraded without disrupting operations or impacting productivity. The updates improved reliability and availability while helping standardize operations across the facilities.

From reactive to predictive operations

Consider a critical piece of rotating equipment that shows no obvious signs of failure during routine inspections. During a period of peak production, it unexpectedly fails. Maintenance teams are called in after hours. Replacement parts are expedited and production runs below capacity until repairs are complete. A repair that could have been completed during a planned shutdown now results in lost production, emergency maintenance and significantly higher costs.

These situations are not uncommon. Many assets are still monitored through periodic inspections, making it difficult to detect developing faults between maintenance intervals.

Predictive maintenance addresses this through continuous monitoring of asset health, allowing maintenance teams to identify early warning signs, prioritize interventions and schedule repairs before failures disrupt production. As part of a broader asset performance management strategy, these insights help organizations improve reliability while making better use of maintenance resources.

One industrial producer replaced periodic manual vibration inspections with continuous wireless condition monitoring across its rotating equipment. Within six months, early warnings identified developing faults before they led to unplanned failures, while eliminating the need for routine manual vibration checks. The result was fewer disruptions and more efficient use of maintenance resources. 

Reduce process variability

Stable operations create opportunities for higher performance. When variability is reduced, operators can run closer to optimal conditions with greater confidence. This helps increase throughput and improve product consistency.

Digital solutions such as Advanced Process Control (APC) help operators continuously adjust to changing process conditions, improving stability and responsiveness as demand changes.

One example comes from a cogeneration plant in Thailand, where APC was used to improve steam and energy optimization. The result was up to a 50 percent reduction in high pressure steam variability, helping reduce disturbances to refinery processes and optimize steam distribution as demand changed. Improvements in process stability also reduced steam consumption while enabling more reliable, efficient plant performance.

As variability decreases, plants can safely operate closer to process limits, increasing output and efficiency without requiring additional capacity.

Increasing output while reducing emissions

Verdantix research suggests operational performance and emissions reduction do not have to be mutually exclusive.

By improving efficiency and reducing energy waste, operations teams can directly contribute to lower emissions intensity. At the same time, increased reliability and throughput support higher production levels.

At a wastewater treatment plant in Germany, an integrated energy management system continuously optimizes how electricity is generated, stored and used across the facility. By improving the efficiency of day to day operations, the plant now relies on external grid power only rarely while reducing annual CO₂ emissions by an estimated 300 tonnes. Rather than treating sustainability as a separate objective, lower emissions became the outcome of operating the plant more efficiently.

The operational advantage

Every company is being asked to do more with the assets they already have with less environmental impact. The organizations making the greatest progress aren't treating those as competing priorities. By improving day to day operational performance, they're increasing output, using energy more efficiently and reducing emissions at the same time.

In today's evolving energy landscape, industrial performance depends on how effectively organizations operate the assets they already have. Reliability, efficiency and process stability are becoming key drivers of both production performance and emissions reduction.