Technology
Our servant and enabler – not our master, not our driver.
Don’t put the cart before the horse!
Technology is designed to serve our needs.
Is your use of technology:
- Achieving cost savings for your business, or adding administrative burden?
- Providing you with useful reports that don’t require programming or a lot of work spreadsheets?
- Providing useful information that your engineers can use to improve asset performance?
- Freeing up your time for better decision making?
Or, is your technology getting in your way?
Our 2024 survey revealed that most maintainers don’t get much value from their systems. Half were unhappy. Lack of training and poor data quality are the two biggest problems they cited.
Tools
AI and GenAI
Most maintainers know little about these but they are powerful tools. They can improve the efficiency of what we do, like planning maintenance work:
Analytics
Your data, even if it’s imperfect, can be useful, but it takes more than management systems to get value from it. We are harnessing the power of AI in analytics in our Assessments. Conventional assessments can not achieve what we achieve with AI, and no one else is doing it.
Maintenance and Reliability Assessments.
We are finding savings of 30% in spares inventories, 60% of PMs that are causing problems, and most of that “hidden” stock that your maintainers have stashed away, avoiding inventory management and your own accounting practices.
Reliability tools
RCM-R: Our Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM-R) software tool is: RCMR2GO
RCFA: Our Root Cause Failure Analysis software is RLT Smart Asset’s 5 Whys Analysis tool.
FRACAS: Our Failure Reporting and Corrective Action System software is RLT Smart Asset’s FRAT.
Are you struggling with …
Your maintenance management system?
Finding information when it’s needed?
Figuring out what to do about the IIoT?
CMMS / EAM / ERP
A lot of users are not happy with their systems because they become distractions that deliver little value. A lot of mistakes made when it comes to systems that are used in managing maintenance.
Here’s a video explaining some of them.
Asset Information Management (AIM)
Maintenance related information is rarely managed well. Without it your planner and maintainers workloads increase, just to find what should be at their fingertips.
Creating, acquiring, saving, and using information and 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.
Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT)
IIoT is definitely a part of 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.