Biopharmaceutical company AbbVie maintains thousands of steam traps at its North American R&D and manufacturing sites. However, outdated and obsolete software and infrastructure limitations made traditional preventive maintenance inefficient, costly and inaccurate. The drugmaker collaborated with Emerson to successfully assess, evaluate, and improve the operation and reliability of the steam traps.
AbbVie presented a user case study on the collaboration at Emerson Exchange 2025, held May 19-22 in San Antonio, Texas, showing how the implementation of wireless, real-time steam trap monitoring resulted in an increase in product yield and quality, improvement in plant reliability, and optimization of productivity, while minimizing the risk of safety incidents, boosting energy efficiency and reducing environmental impact.
From the outset, AbbVie faced a significant challenge: a complex steam network of traps and infrastructure spread across two Illinois campuses—Abbott Park and North Chicago—that needed a scalable and automated solution.
Steam traps are typically audited once a year. However, as many as 30% of steam traps may be out of service when audits are performed, leaving plants vulnerable for long periods of time, according to Joel Lemke, wireless business development manager at Emerson.
An issue of wasted time and energy
“Our annual [preventive maintenance] inspection of steam traps required a significant number of resources in both labor and equipment,” Ellen Kaminski, reliability engineer at AbbVie, told an audience at Emerson Exchange.
Kaminski said the “time from trap failure identification to repair was extremely high, causing wasted time, energy, resources, and contributing to worker safety hazards.” Additionally, she noted that the existing software systems that AbbVie had utilized “were not as intuitive or user friendly and didn’t provide the levels of granularity that Emerson’s Plantweb does for us now.”
Plantweb Insight, Emerson’s user interface, connects to AbbVie’s wireless HART devices and displays real-time statuses of its thousands of steam traps looking for abnormal situations, according to Kaminski.
Erik Parks, senior sales engineer at Emerson, said Emerson’s wireless continuous steam trap monitoring system provided AbbVie with the ability to have visibility into their steam traps to optimize their performance by coordinating support and maintenance.
“It allows them to see all the critical or problem traps,” Parks said. “It’s a wireless solution that’s cost-effective and easy to install. An analytical tool takes all of the information from the system and creates actionable insights — something that they can respond to right away to minimize that steam or energy loss and achieve some carbon reduction.”
Steam trap leaks can account for a 5% to 10% loss of produced steam and associated energy costs because of the time delay between trap failure and proper diagnosis and maintenance. However, Emerson’s Rosemount 708 Wireless Acoustic Transmitters can help monitor steam trap performance in real time, eliminating the need for manual rounds and dramatically reducing energy waste.
Improved safety a side benefit
In 2024, AbbVie identified 14 steam trap failures just in North Chicago alone, Kaminski said.
“Work orders were successfully written to have these faulty traps repaired in a timely manner,” she said. “Over the past two years, we’ve had $214,000 in cost avoidance. Our automated online monitoring reduced our maintenance rounds by 445 hours by eliminating our plant-wide steam trap audit. This allowed our maintenance teams to allocate this time to other projects.”
Kaminski also noted that doing away with the annual plant-wide steam trap inspection, which had included the use of ladders, lifts and tools, “contributed to our very impressive zero OSHA reportable events two years in a row.”
The initiative with Emerson started at AbbVie’s Lake County facility located about 40 miles north of Chicago. Ultimately, the success of the initial pilot project led to a full, enterprise rollout across AbbVie campuses in Chicago, Irvine, California and Puerto Rico, making substantial contributions to the company’s energy and reliability issues.
