The effective operation and maintenance of
an organisation’s plant and equipment is fundamental to maximising productivity
and ultimately business profits. Unexpected equipment failure can introduce
significant costs in both downtime and the cost to repair. Repeated unexpected
failures can cause changes, whether intentional or not, to production planning
to account for the expected reduced productivity and this will directly impact the
products and services being provided to an organisation’s customers.
A secondary consequence of poor maintenance
planning is the corresponding increase in the value of spare parts that an
organisation’s maintenance department will hold. This is in response to a lack
of understanding of the inventory demand of the business and the high
visibility when spare parts are not available in the event of a breakdown.
Does any maintenance plan work?
Manufacturing reports point to one key component of a plant maintenance plan
that provides the most business value: an efficient strategy.
Choosing
Your Strategy
The traditional approach to maintenance
strategies has been to establish a preventative maintenance schedule for each
unit. This approach, in comparison to no strategy at all, greatly reduces the
likelihood or equipment failure and also allows production planning to be
completed with a known constraint which is the downtime required for
preventative maintenance tasks to be completed.
However with the introduction of
computerised maintenance management systems (CMMS) it is now possible for
businesses to take a far more sophisticated approach to delivery maintenance
strategy. JD Edwards EnterpriseOne includes two capabilities within their
Capital Asset Management module to do this. These are the Failure Analysis and
Condition Based Maintenance functionalities.
Failure Analysis allows a maintenance
department to gain a far better understanding of the modes of failure for the
equipment they manage and also the conditions under which that failure occurs.
This information allows the business to develop strategies to both remove the
conditions that are likely to cause failure and also develop responses to
conditions that are known to cause failure and ultimately take preventative and
thus planned actions to reduce the likelihood of an unexpected breakdown
occurring.
As opposed to a scheduled maintenance plan
where maintenance activities are undertaken based on some measure such as time
or distance travelled, a condition-based approach to plant maintenance consists
of asking questions such as, “Is there noticeable wear and tear? Is the asset
exhibiting any unusual behaviour?” If a threshold is reached is then
preventative action can be taken to remove the likely mode of failure that will
result from that condition.
Condition Based Maintenance enables a
business to greatly reduce both the cost of operating and the overall
productivity of their plant by reducing unnecessary shutdowns and expensive
maintenance activities. Maintenance departments can move to a schedule of
inspection and monitoring and then react to that information to deliver the
most efficient maintenance plan possible.
Failure analysis enables a business to
refine and improve the trigger points that will cause maintenance activities to
occur and thus further improving equipment reliability and productivity.
Downstream
Benefits
One of the major benefits of effective
maintenance planning and overall improvement in equipment reliability is the
ability of organisations to significantly reduce their spare parts inventory as
well as reducing the likelihood of stock outs on critical spares.
JD Edwards EnterpriseOne has sophisticated
inventory management, material resource planning and forecasting capabilities
that are tightly integrated in the Capital Asset Management module. These tools
allow organisations to minimise the spare parts required to be carried across
multiple sites and ultimately drive down the cost of operating and maintaining
their plant and equipment. Organisations can gain clear visibility of both the
short term and long terms demands being produced by their maintenance strategy
and develop supply plans to meet those demands.
Another consequence of an effective
maintenance plan is far more confidence in the production plan and thus an
overall improvement in productivity. When production departments are confident
that the equipment they’re using is reliable then they will strive to increase
the overall utilisation of that equipment.
Final
Thoughts
One of the emerging benefits of the
Internet of Things is that the data required to run far more sophisticated and
cost effective maintenance strategies is becoming far easier to acquire and
manage. Businesses are able to gain access to both the current state of their
equipment as well as the conditions under which it is operating. This valuable
information enables businesses to target their maintenance activities for more
efficiently thus reducing their overall costs and giving them a significant
advantage over their competitors.
Rinami has extensive experience is
maximising the value gained from the JD Edwards EnterpriseOne Capital AssetModule and combining all of the functionality available within the product to
deliver maintenance processes and analysis that enable businesses to focus on
true reliability engineering. The Cantara Integration Platform enables the
value of the Internet of Things to be realised by rapidly delivering JD Edwards
integration with any number of data sources. This combined with our mobile technologies that enable a business to push their maintenance processes and
functions out into the field where they add the most value means that we can
offer a complete asset management solution in a very short space of time.
