Most manufacturers are switching from reactive to preventive maintenance. But the transition is not very smooth for them. The reason, you ask? While they are changing the approach, the tools remain the same. Legacy systems and an unconnected workforce are the cogs in the machine. In this blog, let us see how digital checklists can connect the unconnected and streamline preventive maintenance.
Before we dive into digital checklists in Manufacturing, let’s quickly see why you should invest in preventive maintenance.
How preventive maintenance works
In preventive maintenance, you assess asset health by analyzing the data collected from the machines. You can leverage AI/ML algorithms to analyze the data more accurately and identify potential failures and the causes.
Based on the equipment and operation purposes, you can plan preventive maintenance planning and scheduling in several ways, including:
Time-based preventive maintenance (TBM) – a preventive maintenance approach in which you plan and schedule maintenance activities at scheduled times. For example, you may have to lube some equipment after every 200 operating hours.
Usage-based preventive maintenance (UBM) – Consider you have a hydraulic system that might need maintenance after the fluid levels drop to a threshold after a certain period of use. This usage-based maintenance requires planning and scheduling of maintenance activities based on a variety of factors, including how much you used the asset, the weather conditions it was exposed to, etc.
Predictive maintenance (PDM) – In predictive maintenance, you first assess the condition of the equipment to predict when a potential failure can occur. Based on these insights, you can schedule maintenance activities to prevent unexpected failures.
You can consider predictive maintenance as a more evolved form of preventive maintenance. While time-based and usage-based preventive maintenance help you plan and schedule maintenance activities better, they might consume more resources and incur more costs. On the other hand, predictive preventive maintenance helps you create optimized maintenance plans and schedules to achieve high efficiency.
Why preventive maintenance is important
Studies found that the costs of unplanned downtime could go over $100,000 per hour for large manufacturing companies. Another report found that Fortune Global 500 manufacturing companies lose eight percent of their annual revenues, which would translate into over $800 billion, due to unplanned downtime.
The impact of unexpected failures in Manufacturing could be much worse than monetary losses. We witnessed countless safety incidents that claimed hundreds of lives and severely contaminated the environment. Safety incidents can damage an organization’s reputation and negatively impact investors and public trust.
You should prevent potential damage and financial losses before they occur. Preventive maintenance is not an unnecessary overhead. It shields you from unexpected losses.
Challenges in preventive maintenance for manufacturers
Before discussing the challenges, let us understand what is required for successful preventive maintenance.
- For effective planning and scheduling of preventive maintenance, you need thorough inspection of assets, proper management of asset data, and inventory.
- Field technicians play a critical role during asset inspections and maintenance. You need to equip the techs with proper inspection checklists, work orders, accurate guidelines, and quick assistance when met with a roadblock.
Any challenges in the above two aspects would lead to inefficiencies in preventive maintenance strategy, which can turn into catastrophes for your manufacturing unit.
In our experience working with leading manufacturing companies across the world, we identified a major root cause for the challenges in preventive maintenance – unconnected workers.
What is an unconnected worker?
While manufacturing companies are modernizing their back offices with digital solutions, frontline workers are still stuck with legacy systems and paper trails. These digitally unconnected workers spend more time on paperwork than actual maintenance tasks.
What goes wrong with unconnected workers in the system?
Let’s explore the scenario where your frontline workers are unconnected and largely rely on paper.
- Your maintenance technician travels to the back office to collect checklists and then travels to the field to perform the inspection.
- On the field, they take down the asset data manually and fill the paper forms. You can certainly expect human errors in this process.
- The technician might need some help during the inspection. But he can only communicate with a walkie talkie. He is unable to upload pics or videos of assets to explain the situation better. He might wait for field experts to arrive to help.
- After the inspection, the technician again travels back to the back office and hands over the paperwork. The travel time can be several minutes to a few hours. And anything can happen to the paperwork during the transit.
- Back-office admin uploads the data to the ERP system. Again, you can expect typos and human errors. And you cannot see the latest data until the admin updates the ERP. Clearly, there is a huge latency in accessing the latest asset data, which can delay your planning and significantly impact decision-making.
Similar scenario repeats when a work order is created and assigned to a maintenance technician. While performing maintenance activities, technicians should be well-equipped with guidelines, product manuals, and other essential information. Carrying these materials could be cumbersome. Also, the introduction of any new or updated processes would require you to update the documentation. If you miss doing so, your technician might do it all wrong. The 2020 Evergreen Packaging Paper Mill incident was a result of inadequate directions for the maintenance technicians.
Let us summarize the shortfalls in conventional maintenance practices.
Your technicians are spending more time on non-maintenance activities. When pressed for time, they might try to cut some corners during the maintenance activities or paperwork. The room for inefficiencies is huge with paper-based processes, and your technicians are not well-equipped with essential knowledge. All these leaks in the process can result in inefficiencies, equipment failures, and safety incidents.
How digital checklists can improve preventive maintenance
Mobile-based digital checklists can help you connect your frontline workers with your digital ecosystem and eliminate inefficiencies in the preventive maintenance process.
With Proceso, we offer highly customizable, easily configurable digital checklists that replace paper-based processes. Built with low-code/no-code technology, the platform allows you to create and customize checklists and work orders without requiring any coding knowledge. You can make changes on the go without requiring the IT team’s help.
Let us discover how digital checklists on Proceso can redefine your preventive maintenance strategy by addressing the challenges with legacy systems.
- Your frontline workers do not need to travel back and forth between the back office and field. They can access checklists and work orders and execute tasks on their mobile phones.
- Proceso combines mobile capabilities, such as scanning QR codes and capturing pictures/videos, with digital checklists. So, your frontline workers don’t need to manually enter data while also capturing the actual health of the equipment through videos & pictures. The maintenance team, therefore, can capture more asset data that can help you plan your preventive maintenance better.
- You can integrate Proceso seamlessly with your ERP system and implement automated workflows. When the field technicians enter data on the digital checklists, Proceso can automatically push the data to your ERP system, offering you near-real-time asset information. So, you can have more accurate, updated information required to make better maintenance decisions.
- Proceso can combine the digital checklists with your knowledge hub where your technicians can access the latest versions of product manuals, regulatory guidelines, etc. This quick and easy access to essential knowledge empowers your frontline workers to perform their tasks with more efficiency.
Proceso’s digital checklists can empower your frontline workers to help you gain the most accurate asset data and eliminate inefficiencies in the process. So, you can plan your preventive maintenance better and perform the activities with enhanced accuracy to ensure the high availability and reliability of assets.
You can see how Proceso’s digital checklists can work in the real world for your manufacturing business.