Asset Performance Management: the fastest path to reduced downtime and higher throughput
Improve agility, flexibility, and resilience in manufacturing
World-class manufacturing has always hinged on the ability to give customers what they want: a reliable delivery timeline and a product they can trust.
But, as you’ve likely experienced, evolving technologies combined with the pace of changing consumer demand means that manufacturers now must account for growing SKU portfolios, shorter product lifecycles, and pressure to deliver even faster.
This situation demands new approaches. Yet, at the core, you still need to remain flexible, agile, and resilient — even in the face of rapid change.
Why you need to unlock your plant floor data
Your plant floor holds the key: production lines and their machines contain vast amounts of data — often hidden or containerized.
Modern manufacturing equipment, combined with the right software, can now unearth, aggregate and analyze this production data in real time.
Other organizations are already employing this technique — Asset Performance Management (APM) — to leverage their production data to drive more informed operational decision-making and gain system-wide clarity to improve asset function, accelerate production, assess risk, and streamline workflows.
Gain deeper and wider production insights
With analytics and Industrial IoT technology, any enterprise can gain deeper insights into their plant-floor to proactively monitor machine and factory health and apply predictive equipment maintenance to ensure best uptime, highest throughput, and lowest maintenance costs.
An APM helps your enterprise avoid production disruption by connecting shop floor performance data to maximize production and operational visibility. That means fewer surprises for you and more on-time orders for your customers.
Saving just an hour of downtime per asset each month has the potential to translate to millions of dollars each year.
Be proactive with maintenance, not reactive
APM gets you one step closer to these savings by evolving your maintenance practices from reactive and preventative methods to condition-based practices that keep machines—and your business—running smoothly.
In many cases, you can run your entire maintenance workflows directly from your APM. This frees time and focus for additional operational priorities. Most importantly, it means avoiding the costly extreme of taking machines offline or letting them run until they break down.
An APM establishes connectivity to virtually any asset or data stream, helping you analyze trends and compare operational data against other KPIs to discover new opportunities for improvement.
Pre-built, intuitive dashboards allow you to view real-time status at the asset or plant level, so you’re always aware of which machines are off, in-cycle, idle, experiencing a problem, or something else.
And APM technology can provide historical views of logged asset status and event logs that make it easy to visualize data over time with graphical trend lines, so you’re better prepared to make informed decisions based on previous occurrences.
An APM drives organization-wide benefits
- Capture real-time and accurate data on machine / process
- Monitor machine health to avoid surprise outages
- Drive predictive maintenance to eliminate unplanned downtime
- Associate and correlate job/part/operation details with machine performance
- Collect, store, and access historical data to uncover trends and drive predictive maintenance
- Consolidate disparate silos of data
- Reduce scrap by ensuring machines are running properly
- Detect machine patterns that can affect output quality
- Enhance product and process traceability
- Leverage data for process control and root cause analysis
- Receive early warnings of machine performance deviations that may impact quality
- Empower workforce with easy access to live / historical machine performance and process traceability data
- Visualize historical statuses and micro-stops, with detailed reason codes for faster diagnosis
- Control access to just authorized users
Getting started with plantwide digital machine monitoring
AutomateIT’s cloud-based APM solution offers all the benefits listed above and more. Implementing this software and aligning it with your goals can help you meet your financial and production targets.
You can make a successful start by following these six steps:
- Determine your business goals. Don’t get caught up in the hype of IIoT technology, focus on specific benefits like measuring machine health.
- Define success. Link your goals to specific machine monitoring metrics.
- Create a plan. Create a plan for implementation to reap the benefits of machine monitoring.
- Get organizational buy-in. Engage the right decision makers with the benefits of machine monitoring and secure approval.
- Implement. Transform your factories into connected plants with this technology.
- Rinse and repeat. Think of machine monitoring implementation as part of a company-wide digital transformation, not a one-off project.
If you’d like more information on APMs and would like to explore how AutomateIT’s smart manufacturing consultants can help you achieve your goals, contact us today.