Achieving manufacturing maintenance excellence can be challenging when an organization’s systems and processes are disparate. Today's manufacturing organizations are seeing a continued evolution not only in the ways that they deliver services to their customers, but also in how their businesses must operate to meet, and exceed, the growing demands of the marketplace.
What is manufacturing maintenance excellence? The definition of maintenance excellence varies across companies. While reliability is a cornerstone, how manufacturing maintenance excellence is measured can differ significantly. Factors such as costs, unplanned downtime, scheduled downtime, and other variables can be key metrics that companies use to set goals and determine maintenance excellence.
Today, manufacturing organizations are embracing technology to help in their pursuit of maintenance excellence. Mulesoft’s CTO, Uri Sarid, said, “Service in seconds is digital; service in days is not.”1 This statement summarizes the core reason manufacturing organizations are making the shift to digital platforms. By jettisoning inefficiencies like paper-based maintenance tracking in favor of real-time data sharing between disparate software platforms, manufacturing leaders can meet the ongoing demand for goods while establishing a collaborative workplace between key systems, and among employees and internal stakeholders.
The wealth of strategies and numerous technology considerations can become overwhelming when starting a plan to digitize maintenance management efforts. However, by moving to a comprehensive Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) like Maintenance Connection, most organizations can deploy three core initiatives to yield quick benefits:
- Reduce paper consumption
- Capture & report on data in real time
- Connect disparate systems
Reduce Paper Consumption
Many manufacturing organizations still use paper-based programs for tracking and recording maintenance and operations work. An initiative to reduce paper consumption can have real financial implications to the tune of thousands of dollars spent a year on paper resources. Reducing paper consumption is also a supportive action for sustainability programs or green environmental initiatives that many corporations have.
However, there are other equally significant benefits of moving from paper systems to a CMMS. A CMMS improves collaboration and communication. Digital systems also enhance accessibility to a broader team of employees, making it much easier to share information, compare notes, and interact without being physically near one another.
Paper-based systems often make it difficult to search for key information and the process itself can be time-consuming. With a digital CMMS platform, searching for work order history or specific notes about repairs on an asset is easier and faster, reducing labor time and speeding time to repair.
With Maintenance Connection, manufacturing organizations can:
- Realize and harness the power of digital transformation and workplace collaboration
- Enable all organizational stakeholders to get on-demand, real-time insight into key metrics and data
- Share insights digitally – automated notifications, scheduled reports by email, or exported reports in PDF format
Capture and Report on Data in Real Time
In today’s competitive landscape, organizations must able to make quick business decisions and adapt to changing conditions. A key to adaptability is on-demand access to accurate and up-to-date critical information, from work order history to “how-to” tutorials, at any time and from any place, enabling improved business decisions.
Maintenance Connection’s CMMS platform has helped numerous manufacturing companies take the first steps towards digital transformation in a way that is easily adopted across the organization. With the ability to use Maintenance Connection’s mobile-agnostic platform, manufacturing technicians can access essential information regarding assigned work easily, receive notifications about work order changes, and make real-time updates from observations in the field. Mobility ensures accuracy and integrity by recording the work properly and making the information available to all key stakeholders.
Through Maintenance Connection, leadership teams gain instant access to any data point across the maintenance operation. Managers and executives also have easy-to-access, codeless configuration reports that offer insights into key metrics such as overall operational efficiency (OEE), operational uptime percentages, and cost of downtime.
Connect Disparate Systems
Companies tend to have many systems that cover all or part of their business. Unfortunately, in many organizations, these systems are siloed, and the associated information within each system is compartmentalized, limiting access and reducing the data’s value. Through the integration of vital business systems, companies can gain comprehensive visibility into organizational data from all applications, ranging from Enterprise Resource Planning systems (ERPs) to Internet of Things (IoT) meter readings. This integration effort is not necessarily easy, but the increased visibility into business intelligence enables better decisions supported by actionable, real-time insights.
Companies will continue to adopt software tools to help them complete day-to-day tasks efficiently while simultaneously ensuring key stakeholders have a transparent view into company information. Considerations such as IT/IS infrastructure security, ease of end-user access, and browser-agnostic application access are growing in importance for modern manufacturing organizations as companies seek integrated digital systems that form a cohesive data intelligence stream.
The rising need among digital manufacturing enterprises to gain full visibility into the software chain has brought about the necessity for easily connected applications that share real-time data, regardless of deployment method. With Maintenance Connection’s RESTful API, manufacturing organizations can connect key applications instantly, such as ERP platforms or Internet-of-Things applications. These connections allow for closed loop data management in the software toolchain, enabling complete data visibility and real-time data insights that range from inventory stock availability across multiple locations to the current meter readings for key assets.
Learn more about how Accruent’s Maintenance Connection, a powerful, industry-leading CMMS, helped L’Oréal implement common multi-site reporting metrics.
1. How Platform Strategies Continue to Create Value
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