Making the most of your computerized maintenance management system

Manufacturers know that success requires more than ensuring system uptime and meeting productivity demands. To compete globally, facility and operations managers realize that every asset purchase and maintenance decision they make impacts the bottom line.

Without adequate insight into the health of plant floor assets, manufacturers can lose time and resources. When a machine fails, the loss can dramatically exceed the simple cost of replacing or fixing the machine; companies must also consider lost revenue resulting from downtime and the personnel time required to remedy the problem.

Not surprisingly, asset management has become one of the top concerns of manufacturers. Operational excellence programs and lean enterprise initiatives can now be found throughout virtually every manufacturing enterprise. All of these efforts have the same general objective -- creating and implementing proactive, cost-saving methods and processes designed to maximize operational efficiency and drive cash to the bottom line.

As companies examine their infrastructures for ways to operate more efficiently, the maintenance, repair and operations (MRO) organization has emerged as a prime target. Largely untouched by past initiatives geared toward optimizing quality and productivity, MRO activities were viewed as a necessary evil (a money-eating cost center) rather than an opportunity for increasing profitability. But all that is changing, as manufacturers begin to place MRO at the heart of their asset management strategies.

The starting point of any asset management solution is the plant floor — the primary domain of the MRO organization. Historically, what's been missing has been the ability to peer into the automation platform's intelligent devices, extract predictive data and link it to the maintenance organization. Today, new computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS), combined with sophisticated condition monitoring equipment, are making a dramatic impact by providing the tools to gather, analyze and distribute data throughout the enterprise.

In recent months, new technologies have become readily available and cost-effective, making it possible to distribute data from plant-floor devices to higher levels of the enterprise. Products such as Rockwell Automation's Entek Enshare, an enterprise asset health system, and Rockwell Automation's RSBizWare PlantMetrics, a software system for evaluating production performance, help companies improve the flow of information throughout the facility, making the connection from CMMS to production, scheduling and procurement. With a well-connected plant floor environment, companies can pre-determine device performance criterion and decide when and what corrective action is required.

Once manufacturers are able to integrate plant floor data with their CMMS, the next challenge is scheduling the work. Traditionally, a maintenance manager would determine when to fix a machine. In today's new MRO model, the CMMS calculates the production schedule for a particular piece of equipment, selects the optimum time to shut down the machine for maintenance and issues the work order. And, using the same information, the system can initiate a request for a replacement part, or order outside skilled labor as required (via supply chain/e-commerce capabilities).

Simply by transitioning from reactive to predictive maintenance, an organization can easily (and painlessly) take 10 to 30 percent of the inventory cost out of the MRO expense equation with virtually no impact on productivity or availability of the facility. Predicting the reliability of a single piece of equipment on the plant floor can be the difference between a few minutes of preventative maintenance and hours of downtime. And this is just the tip of the potential cost savings afforded by a well-executed CMMS.

Maximizing Your CMMS: A Simple Action Plan

The following action plan focuses on four primary plant activities. These actions are designed to get your maintenance organization on track toward operating its CMMS to its maximum potential.

Equipment meters. In many facilities today, preventative maintenance is performed based on the number of cycles or hours a piece of equipment has operated. To collect this data, a maintenance person walks around with a clipboard, writes down the metered information, then manually punches this data into the CMMS or uses a handheld device to collect the data and download it into the CMMS. The CMMS then analyzes the data, and if enough hours or cycles have passed to warrant preventative maintenance activity, the system will kick out a work order to perform the task.

Here's an easier way to leverage your CMMS investment. The programmable controller that's controlling your application already knows how many hours that piece of equipment has operated. Therefore, simply employ a software program, like Rockwell Automation's RSBizWare RSSql, to automatically extract the meter readings from the controller and merge this data into the CMMS. The CMMS will then automatically generate preventative maintenance work orders as needed.

This eliminates expensive manual meter reading and allows more effective use of maintenance personnel. And, because the process is completely automated, it assures that preventative maintenance schedules are completed on time. In addition, there's no repeating costs involved with this solution; it's a one-time investment and the activity is permanent and reliable.

Alarm levels. A photoswitch in a manufacturing application offers a classic example of how real-world maintenance is performed today. As the photo lens gets dirty over time, it stops functioning. Ultimately, the line shuts down and maintenance responds with some sophisticated tools to fix the problem (a shop rag and a bottle of Windex), and the line is back up and running again.

Here's a better approach. Many of today's plant floor devices are capable of diagnosing themselves. These devices have enough intelligence built into them that they can tell operators directly when they've got a problem. You can take advantage of this capability by connecting this same photoswitch to the CMMS via DeviceNet. Now it can notify operators when its margin indicator is in trouble before it fails.

And because the photoswitch is self-diagnosing, operators can easily monitor its status. When the margin of fault reaches a specified point (before actual failure), the system automatically kicks out the required work order to complete the task. This eliminates unnecessary preventative maintenance, such as cleaning the lens every three months, whether it needs it or not. Now the photoswitch is only cleaned exactly when it needs to be cleaned.

Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE). OEE is essentially a measure of three components in a manufacturing environment: the quality of a product or specific piece of equipment; the efficiency of a production process; and availability of a piece of equipment. Take data from those three parameters, multiply them together, and you get a single number that indicates the overall health of your manufacturing process, or your OEE.

What keeps most managers from performing OEE is the extensive data collection and calculation requirements that are required. OEE is a great tool, but it's often cumbersome to implement. Here's a solution: Your programmable controller likely knows the reject rate coming off of a piece of equipment, as well as the equipment availability and efficiency ratio. Use your CMMS to extract this data from the controller and automate this part of the data collection process. Once it's in the CMMS, finish the calculations and compute the OEE there.

Your maintenance organization now has a great management tool that's eluded them because of complex data collection issues. Now it's completely automated and available for immediate use. For maximum effectiveness, take these real-time OEE reports and put them directly into the hands of your operators and maintenance personnel. This will allow your employees to see exactly what's going on in their facility and allows them to make positive change in your facility's performance metrics.

Electronic Work Flow. One tool that is relatively new to the marketplace yet provides substantial benefits is electronic work flow. Electronic work flow takes all the traditional manual production approval processes and puts them into a paperless environment. A key advantage of this tool is that you create the business rules (and exceptions to the rules) for each work process.

For example, if your maintenance personnel on the shop floor need a replacement part or want to buy something that's not in the storeroom, in many cases they have to go through some type of arduous approval process. With electronic work flow, as soon as the maintenance person makes a material request, the request is automatically routed to the right individual based on the specified business rules, or guidelines -- all delivered electronically through the facility without any intervention.

Most CMMS packages come equipped with some type of electronic work flow built into them -- with no separate software needed. As such, taking advantage of this valuable maintenance tool is as simple as maximizing the capabilities and features of your CMMS.

Asset management will continue to be targeted as a primary area for improvements, which transfer into areas like inventory reduction, reduced downtime, increased productivity and extended equipment life. A fine-tuned CMMS plays a key role in enabling manufacturing facilities to streamline their MRO procedures and purchasing practices, and is an essential component in any asset management strategy.

A free white paper on e-Manufacturing is available from Rockwell Automation at www.automation.rockwell.com .

For more information on asset management and CMMS solutions from Rockwell Automation, contact the Rockwell Automation Response Center, Dept. (1336), 10701 Hampshire Avenue South, Bloomington, Minn., 55438, (800) 223-5354, Ext. 1336, fax: (800) 500-0329.

Source: Rockwell Automation

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