Proactive Control Valve Maintenance with AVEVA CONNECT & UReason

How continuous cloud analytics and time-series diagnostics are shifting valve maintenance from firefighting to foresight.

From Reactive to Predictive: A Necessary Shift 

Control valves fail quietly. Unlike a pump that seizes or a heat exchanger that leaks visibly, a degrading valve tends to drift — a little more hysteresis here, a slightly sticky stem there — until loop performance erodes enough to catch an engineer’s attention. By that point, the damage is done: unplanned downtime, off-spec product, or an emergency maintenance callout that costs far more than a scheduled intervention ever would have.

The traditional response has been reactive combined with preventive: inspect on a fixed schedule or respond to alarms. Neither approach is efficient. Fixed schedules generate unnecessary maintenance on healthy valves while missing faults developing between rounds. Alarm-based response, by definition, means the problem has already matured.

The shift to predictive maintenance changes the logic entirely — catching faults while they are still developing, prioritising only the valves that genuinely need attention, and scheduling intervention at a time that suits operations rather than one dictated by an emergency. Achieving this requires two things: rich, continuous valve data and analytics capable of interpreting it intelligently. AVEVA CONNECT and UReason’s Control Valve App deliver both.

Early Fault Detection Using Time-Series Data 

The diagnostic power of modern valve analytics lies in time-series analysis. Rather than evaluating a valve’s condition at a single point in time — as a manual stroke test or a quarterly audit does — continuous time-series monitoring builds a living picture of how each valve behaves across thousands of operating cycles.

UReason’s Control Valve App applies proven signal-processing and pattern-recognition algorithms to the continuous streams of valve position, controller output, and process variable data already available in your historian. From these signals, it characterises each valve’s dynamic behaviour and flags deviations before they reach alarm severity.

Critically, these fault signatures are trended over time — not just flagged in isolation. A valve showing a 15% increase in hysteresis over three months tells a different story than one that jumped to 40% in a week. Time-series trending gives maintenance teams the context to prioritise intelligently and plan interventions at the right moment. 

Florian Zurfluh comments : “Industry data consistently shows that over 20% of control valves in a typical plant are performing sub-optimally at any given time — the majority without triggering a single process alarm. Time-series diagnostics, provided by the Control Valve App, surfaces this silent degradation before it becomes a process problem.” 

How AVEVA CONNECT Enables Continuous Analytics 

Early fault detection is only valuable if the analytics run continuously — not monthly, not weekly, but around the clock, on every valve, across every site. This is precisely what AVEVA CONNECT makes possible.

CONNECT provides a secure, cloud-native platform that ingests operational time-series data from plant historians — AVEVA PI, AVEVA Historian, and others — and makes it available to applications like UReason’s Control Valve App without requiring dedicated on-site analytics infrastructure. There are no servers to provision, no analytics databases to maintain, and no site-by-site software deployments to manage by you – true SaaS.

Once connected, the UReason app runs its diagnostic engine continuously or scheduled against incoming valve data. Every new data point refines the valve’s health score, updates its fault classification, and — where deterioration is detected — advances its position in the maintenance priority queue. Operations and reliability teams can configure and access a live fleet dashboard through CONNECT’s browser-based interface: current health status, trending fault indicators, and recommended actions, visible from any location without VPN tunnels or local system access. 

Florian Zurfluh comments : “Continuous analytics on CONNECT means the first person to know a valve is developing a fault is the reliability engineer — not the process operator dealing with a loop that’s stopped responding.” 

The technology for proactive control valve maintenance is no longer experimental. AVEVA CONNECT and UReason’s Control Valve App bring together the data infrastructure, diagnostic intelligence, and operational accessibility needed to move every plant — and every portfolio — from reactive firefighting to genuinely predictive reliability management. The valves that will cause your next unplanned shutdown are degrading right now. Continuous analytics means you can find them first.