November 2021

Focus on: Preventative Maintenance Maintenance Matters helps create a feedback loop and also a level of interest in the wider user population. If the end users are also key personnel that others watch to take their cue from, then they become even more important. Being selected to field test the new system is seen as a reward or a vote of confidence. It’s a little like Tom Sawyer asking his friends to paint the wall. The work gets done and you gain valuable allies for the system rollout. Every project needs a win. A quick win helps to establish credibility, ensures senior management support doesn’t waver and might release capital for the next phase. Establishing what improvements are required and focusing initial efforts on those, helps to create some visible gains. That increased credibility can be useful if the next phase is more difficult or if there is a considerable lag in crystalising a win. A good example is looking at paperless maintenance. While paper is a low-tech approach it’s dependable and simple. However, it’s administratively intensive, expensive to store and ever more expensive to retrieve and analyse. Deploying your maintenance system with an App allows you to free up administration time for individual engineers, access equipment history at the machine and also create real time reporting outcomes. You also see dramatic improvements in data quality and quantity recorded. Moving from a 16-step paper process to a 4-step electronic process frees up a lot of time. With the data now going directly into the CMMS, you create the reporting benefits and an analysis capability. There is improved accuracy which affects metrics like Mean Time to Repair (MTTR) and Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) which can be used to adjust the preventative maintenance intervals for your equipment. This leads us to one final element. Your CMMS system needs some feedback loop once it’s up and running in order to ensure there is always a drive towards efficiency. The DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve and Control) wheel is a useful way to view your CMMS. One simple example is taking the breakdown information reported on your CMMS to inform your MTBF measure and to then compare this to the preventative maintenance intervals on the related asset. Your CMMS can then identify over- and under- maintained assets based on this metric allowing Turck Banner Ltd. Blenheim House, Blenheim Court, Wickford, Essex SS11 8YT Tel: 01268 578888 wireless@turckbanner.co.uk Wireless Vibration & Temperature Monitoring As simple as your check engine light Distribute Connected data solutions • Data is pulled from the controller via cellular or Ethernet and Stored in a SCADA or Cloud Platform Alert and Consumption Consume the data via Dashboards, alerts and long term analysis • Early detection of any increase allows for planned, preventative maintenance Measure & Collect Wireless Vibration, Temperature & Current Monitoring • IP67 & IP69K Sensors • Sensors Powered by batteries Transmit IIOT Gateway/Controller Solution Kits • Sensors send data wirelessly to Gateway/Controller • Machine Learning Algorithm you to free up resources and save money. Identifying value added and non-value-added activities has become more important and over time it’s possible for your CMMS to have duplicate tasks appearing in weekly, monthly and yearly PMs that are wasted effort. In one example 80% of the tasks inside the CMMS were duplicates or overlapping. Getting your CMMS to warn you that this is happening creates additional wins over time and more credibility for your initiatives. *Louis Tuttle, PEMAC product director