Technology
Is your maintenance technology letting you down? Are you considering new solutions?
CAUTION
Don’t put the cart before the horse!
Technology is designed to serve our needs.
It is expensive to implement and license. Ask yourself if it is:
- Helping you achieve cost savings that off set its own cost?
- Reducing administrative workload?
- Is your maintenance budget any lower?
- Is it helping you with valuable information to improve reliability.
- Is it delivering meaningful reports that enable important and valuable decisions?
- Is it helping you to have the spare parts you need, when you need them?
We speak with a lot of maintainers and engineers and the answers to those questions are often “no”.
The CMMS has actually been around for over 60 years. It really took off about 40 years ago when computing became more widely available. It has evolved a lot, but have we?
Our own survey (2024) revealed that most maintainers use their system only for tracking what they are doing. Half are unhappy with their system. Lack of training and poor data quality are the two biggest problems they cite. When asked what to do about it, they all point to the need for training.
If the tool isn’t doing what you need, perhaps you have the wrong tool, or perhaps you don’t know how to use it.
CMMS / EAM / ERP
It’s not alphabet soup – they refer to various types of business management systems (transaction management) that are used for maintenance. A lot of users are not happy with their systems and for good reason – they are distractions that deliver little, and sometimes no value. There are a lot of mistake made in this area of managing maintenance. Here’s a video explaining some of them.
AI and GenAI
Artificial intelligence is new and we just beginning to see how to use it.
We are harnessing AI in analytics to give us quick wins and insight into where to look for problems when we do our Maintenance and Reliability Assessments. Before we even arrive at site we have seen savings of 30% in spares, identified 60% of PMs that are not adding, but destroying value, and identified most of that “hidden” stock that’s not on your books, but you see all around your operations.
We have a new AI enabled tool that helps maintenance planners become far more productive and produce better job plans: AIJobPlanner.
AIM (Asset Information Management)
Not having the information you need to perform maintenance or even carry out various reliability analyses is a significant handicap. Having the wrong parts in stores, buying the wrong items in an emergency, not really knowing what training may be needed, and having only weak evidence to demonstrate how well you are managing are signs of poor management. Can you find what you need easily, or do you need a lot of time to search?
Creating, saving, using data to deliver value instead of distracting you and your staff won’t happen without deliberate management of those processes. Read about it in our Blog, or consider our AIM training course.
IIoT
Industrial Internet of Things – is it the Future of Maintenance? Read our article in MRO magazine.
Are you shifting to a “digital operation”?
According to IDC, Flexera, Twilio, Gartner and Accenture: Global spending on digital transformation is expected to reach $3.4 Trillion by 2026. The US alone will account for $1 Trillion by the end of 2025. $656 Billion is being spent on “the future of work”, optimizing work flows. Covid-19 accelerated these efforts with the Cloud, AI and IIoT as the top areas for investment.
MIT reports that 87% of business leaders expect digital transformation to disrupt their industries. McKinsey reports that 64% expect to need it to stay competitive. Baker McKenzie reports that 69% of IT decision makers view it as a way to improve process efficiency.
77% of companies surveyed have already started while 23% of companies are non-digital, but expect disruption! 53% see selecting the right technologies as a top priority and 45% are concerned with their organization’s readiness to accept change.
BCG reports that only 35% of digital transformations are successful! McKinsey reports that larger organizations have the most trouble and it comes from a lack of skills and expertise.
Value Extraction
Are organizations moving too quickly and leaving their people behind. In maintenance we see plenty of evidence that is the case. Why not invest a bit in getting value out of the technology you already have?
Is your Asset Management Ecosystem working for you, or are you working for it?
Most companies have an array of systems and tools that are keeping people busy, but not delivering desired results.
Technology can certainly help in many ways, but technology-led initiatives can easily pile up and fail to deliver. Success is not “go live”. Success is achieving results – and most companies don’t even measure that!
Put “thought-ware” ahead of software! Some areas where we can help:
- Digitization. Where can it add value?,
- Evidence-based decision making and analytics. What can we learn from our data?
- Optimizing spares levels and working capital tied up in inventory,
- Inventory optimization. Reduce inventory and increase service levels.
- Reduce purchasing workload.
- Leveraging the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) technologies without going overboard.
- Reliability analysis.
- Maintenance management.
