Context
A food company consists of various departments supported by different support systems for the production and preservation of the processed product.
A large part of maintenance activities is self-managed by the original equipment manufacturers, while the operating staff carries out autonomous maintenance tasks.
Problem
Failures and anomalies are handled only by containment (corrective maintenance). In addition to the problem generated by the maintenance strategy, failures are not followed by a specific analysis to prevent the recurrence of events.
Regarding preventive maintenance and all the necessary controls/inspections/tests, the facility manager has a static checklist to remember the activities to be carried out throughout the year, but with the increase in preventive interventions (coming from a specific process improvement project), managing the various maintenance work orders becomes challenging, in addition to the fact that activities are combined both on the machines and on any other deadlines across the entire infrastructure.
Finally, some infrastructure systems are critical for the whole company: at the moment, they are periodically monitored with on-site checks and measurement sampling, but there is no alert in case of anomalies, which can only be detected with a predictive data analysis system.
Improvement actions
Our intervention focused on automating the entire maintenance process corrective, preventive and predictive, through our integrated tool CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management System) customized to the needs of the Facility Manager.
The software includes the following features:
- Automatic schedule - the previously manual checklist has been digitized in order to automatically provide the Facility Manager with the next interventions scheduled to take place and update itself autonomously with the records. For preventive interventions by production departments, the CMMS has been connected to the machines to replace the frequency based on time with that based on machine operating cycles, further increasing the efficiency of the maintenance process;
- User-friendly intervention logging - the user can record interventions with a simple click from the intervention plan, transcribing only a few data points at their discretion on the logging form. This makes it possible to minimize the time spent on data entry;
- Support for planning interventions - the system monitors planned and completed interventions in order to provide, through forms, colors, and visual management, guidance to the user on potentially overly busy periods, so as to make the most of balancing and efficiency of interventions;
- Traceability of failures and countermeasures - all failures are traced and the system guides the user to resolve them, to the root cause. Data layering highlights the areas and causes with the greatest impact on availability, to guide decisions on priorities and failure prevention;
- Predictive maintenance for critical systems - for critical systems, where it is not sufficient to guarantee availability through preventive maintenance (corrective is excluded a priori as a possibility), a continuous monitoring system has been put in place with logic for comparing field measurements across the various instruments through direct interconnection with the data sources of the recordings. Through visual management and graphs specifically developed with the Facility Manager, the CMMS indicates with priority whether and where to intervene well in advance;
- Dashboard for governance and improvement - the Facility Manager has an integrated dashboard to manage the entire process, carry out improvement actions, and monitor measurements across the various systems. This allows him to interface with a single platform developed to provide him only useful and up-to-date information in real time.
Result
Adopting the CMMS made it possible to stabilize the main maintenance processes for machinery and infrastructure, bringing the plant’s average annual availability to 98%.
The Facility Manager is now supported by suitable management tools that are simple, automatic, and targeted, so that he can invest time in integrating the other systems, with the goal of having the full control of all company maintenance integrated into a single system.