Maintenance Management - Integrate Into The World Of Manufacturing Operations

Everyone knows that poorly maintained assets can lead to breakdowns and stoppages that impact production. Less obvious is the impact it can have in terms of quality issues; spoilage, rejects and waste; delivery commitments; morale; and the extra strain on Maintenance resources. All of which are losses that can be minimised.

The challenge for Maintenance in today's climate is to work smarter and leaner, holding less inventory and still maintaining plant uptime. The task is more difficult where no data is available to analyse history, visualise progress or evaluate performance.

More and more manufacturers are increasing the responsibilities of operators so that they are responsible for their workspace and assets, including routine Maintenance checks and procedures. Making Maintenance information available to production in real-time not only assists them with their goals in terms of output, quality and waste, but also reminds them of their Maintenance commitments and helps them plan tasks opportunistically like during job changeovers to minimise downtime.

Most Maintenance packages provide asset management, inventory controls, Maintenance task scheduling etc. but when implemented as part of an MES, the solution can provide additional functionality and benefits because it can be better integrated within the overall manufacturing operations environment.

Shopfloor-Online MES provides the link between production and Maintenance allowing operators to report faults directly from their workspace, and indicate whether the fault is critical or can be scheduled later, and being real-time, the Maintenance team can be instantly alerted.

Accountability is a big issue, often there is a communication gap between operators reporting faults and Maintenance restoring working assets, which can easily escalate to a blame game. with Shopfloor-Online MES Maintenance and repair modules: the key times of operators flagging faults; repair work starting and completing are automatically recorded. It is also very easy to see whether operators have done all their routine checks.

In addition, through analysis tools the Maintenance team can identify clear priorities for PM; schedule PM work intelligently; check the availability of skills and spares; and ensure that less critical faults are not overlooked.

The more modules of Shopfloor-Online MES that are used, the greater the visibility of production, quality and Maintenance data to everyone, leading to more effective communication and decision making across the plant. All of this leads to more uptime, more output, less waste, fewer quality issues and improved on-time deliveries.