Data Analytics and Traceability in Maintenance

Information is power, and in the case of maintenance it is no different. The fact that repair or revision work orders have correct traceability is of vital importance to know the current status of the assets and to know how to improve the entire maintenance process.

In most cases, when an accident or error occurs that causes a production stoppage, an analysis is performed to find the root cause of the failure. This is not an easy or quick task, since the historical information of the asset is usually decentralized, on paper and often incomplete.

In order to give a reliable and real answer as to what has been the cause of an asset stoppage, it is necessary to have historical information on the different maintenance works. It may be useful to know if preventive maintenance tasks have been executed as planned, what the technician’s recommendations were in the last revision, if there is any pending corrective work request, etc. Obtaining all this information is costly if you do not have an EAM system that traces all maintenance actions and centralizes all information in a single environment. With all this information available, you can know the chronology of the asset and determine if the failure was avoidable or if, on the contrary, it has been acted correctly.

Continuous Process Improvement

In any case, having traceability of the different stages of maintenance processes in assets not only serves to justify stoppages in production. The maintenance processes are auditable and need to be evaluated periodically to detect weaknesses and prevent non-compliance or breakdowns. With all this information available and contextualized, decision-making is facilitated for the continuous improvement of maintenance procedures.

One of the main objectives of any company is the continuous improvement of processes:

In the area of maintenance, continuous improvement focuses on optimizing maintenance procedures to reduce or eliminate failures in machinery, and thus increase the useful life of assets and avoid stoppages in production. But to achieve optimal procedures, a thorough analysis is required: taking into account critical equipment, maintenance actions, available resources and budget…

An EAM system facilitates this analysis as it allows the exploitation of all this information, either through pre-created dashboards within the same platform or through external BI (Business Intelligence) clients.

Inventory and Purchasing Management

Another point would be the part of inventory and purchasing management, which records the complete process of budgeting, ordering, delivery/return and invoicing. This module makes it easy to define the minimum necessary stock and the ideal supply point ideal to acquire materials and resources. In addition, the FIFO, LIFO and FEFO methods can be applied, depending on the warehouse or type of article, to adapt to each situation.

In addition to planning and managing all maintenance activities, an EAM system must have a traceability of the different maintenance works that an asset has gone through. All this, relating it to equipment documentation, technician recommendations, preventive work, machine execution times, time allocation… in order to have a broader and real understanding of the status of the different assets and facilitate decision-making for the continuous improvement of maintenance processes.

Becolve Digital’s EAM system, IFS Ultimo, has standardized dashboards/KPIs using Microsoft Power BI technology, which provide management information on open and executed activities, corrective and preventive maintenance, costs and budgets, asset availability, trends and root causes. These dashboards are gradually being expanded and can even be created using Power BI, Tableau or any other BI tool.

IFS Ultimo is a SaaS platform, the solution can be accessed from any site and device, and allows us to have transparency within the company.

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