Podcast: From log books to dashboards — How digitalization drives proactive maintenance
Chris van den Belt is the head of product management at IFS Ultimo, and his colleague Berend Booms is the head of EAM Insights. Chris and Berend recently spoke with Plant Services editor in chief Thomas Wilk about how can software (CMMS and EAM) help companies move to more proactive maintenance modes, and which parts of the workday to focus on when they start making that change.
Below is an excerpt from the podcast:
PS: A lot of teams have a shift handover meeting, a regular meeting, but a lot of times it's difficult to make sure that all information is handed over in an efficient way between all the coffee and donuts and catch-ups. Can you talk about why that moment of the day is so critical to success and getting more proactive about maintenance?
BB: That's a great question, Tom, and to answer the question properly, I'm going to transport this back in time, right? So about 10 years ago or so. And at the time, we developed a dedicated shift handover module to address exactly these challenges. How do you capture the most critical information, all of those details, all the nitty gritty, and make it available to other people to look at and make sense of.
It really stemmed from a need that we observed at the time, but I think it's also very prevalent still today. Many teams, they still rely on physical log books, an actual book, to document the shift information. And while these books serve as a central repository of sorts, accessing the data within them is incredibly cumbersome. Simple tasks like just browsing the earlier reports, identifying trends among them, or even pinpointing specific issues that have occurred, it's nearly impossible without investing too much of your own time, and time is a very valuable asset.
For me, digitizing the process brings a very significant advantage. First of all, what digitization does is it opens up access to this very critical and very valuable data, to a larger audience. Instead of it being confined to a physical book, the information becomes accessible across teams, across departments, across the entire organization. And since it is also indexed in such a way that it becomes easy to search, you're able to find exactly the information that you're looking for very easily and make sensible decisions there. What it does then is it turns the logbook, the handover logbook, into a source of reference.
Second of all, what this also does – digitizing the information and placing it into a CMMS or EAM system – allows you to create meaningful relationships between pieces of data. You could, for example, relate all of the information pertaining to a particular asset or a component of that asset on the asset or component level. So a team can easily look back and find out everything that has been reported on said asset or the component during a shift. Even if no further maintenance activity is required, that is still very useful information to have as a maintenance department. So you're bridging a gap, a communication gap, if you will, between those different departments, and really enriching the asset registration as a whole.
Finally, the power of these digital solutions for me also extends greatly into reporting and analytics. By integrating the data that you have with tools like Power BI, organizations can start generating very insightful dashboards, very insightful reports. By this approach, not only does your team realize a very clear safe and compliant record of the asset history; you're also generating valuable insights that you can use for decision making. From these insights, what you're then able to do is you're taking confident decisions with regards to how you invest into the asset life cycle and extending the asset life cycle, how you go about improving reliability and boosting productivity within the workplace.
So in essence, for effective shift handovers, my take is they're largely enabled by the sort of structured digital processes, such as a centralized EAM platform. What these shift handovers do is they create clarity, they drive smarter and data-driven decision making, which at the end of the day benefits the entire organization.
PS: Something you mentioned near the start of your answer for me also informed the rest of that through-line, which is that if you think back 5 years ago, to all the people that you worked with, that team will have probably changed over 100%. When you digitize this kind of information, no matter who you're working with, that information will be available to them going forward. And I think when you're in the moment of that morning meeting, you think, “oh, this team will never change, these are the people that I work with.” But five years down the line, you're helping your future self and your future colleagues by embracing these kinds of processes.
BB: Yes, you're, you're essentially investing in the future ahead of time. If you consider the fact that we have this newer generation joining the workforce, for them to take part in that cycle, be part of the process, and make use of all of the knowledge that's retained within people's heads, it's a near impossible task. But by digitizing that information, making it accessible, and giving them the tools to actually start being productive from day one, you're taking huge steps into bridging those skilled labor gaps.
PS: If I could switch the conversation to bring in the operator side of things. Operators and maintenance share the morning meeting together and a lot of times the operators are outside of the immediate responsibility of the maintenance team. And yet a lot of plants wrestle with the degree to which they can involve the operators in the care of their own machines, their own assets. So, Chris, if I could ask you about this topic of “autonomous maintenance,” what, in your opinion, is critical about bringing operators into asset management?
CvdB: Let's first talk about why you would do that. I think, first of all, they really know their assets. They know how they sound, how they feel, they work with them every day, they stand next to them every day, and they know a lot about them.
So first line maintenance, simple repairs, it's just normal to let them take care of that because also the response time is very short, it's within one minute so if something goes wrong or breaks down, they are the first ones who are in place. Also it's not only about simple repairs. It's also about inspections, lubrications, adjustments. Keeping the equipment in a like-new state and really taking care of it is an important first step.
The second reason is that it frees up the limited capacity of the maintenance team because they are simply running around from failure to failure, spending a lot of time on routine tasks, and especially in this skilled labor shortage it's just a wise decision to make sure that the operations team, the production team, takes care of this part of the maintenance. A good reason to do so is that it leads to a higher uptime, just because of the fact that if we have a look at the mean time to repair, their response time is quick; they will be able to identify the reason behind a failure, and they are able to have a quick diagnosis, so that will lead to a faster fix of problems.
Also the mean time between failure, the number of failures, will decrease because simply a better asset condition will lead to less failures, and also the fact that they identify emerging failures is also another reason to take care of that. It also leads to cost savings. Just the fact that downtime is reduced will lead to less repair costs, less material costs, production loss, and waste. The resource utilization will be more efficient when you just shift tasks from the maintenance team to the operations team.
PS: Klaus Blache down at the University of Tennessee's Reliability and Maintainability Center always says that success stories begin with the phrase, “here's how operations and maintenance figured it out.” So, I was curious to know your take on this. Why is it that departments often struggle with this concept of bringing operations in and helping to care for their assets in this way?
CvdB: That is all about culture, mindset, and even their objectives. From the culture perspective, they often operate in silos. We often see this “we use and you fix” mentality, where they are pointing at each other. It's always the fault of the maintenance team that a machine breaks down from the operator's perspective. But then from the maintenance perspective, yeah, they see that the operators make a mess of it: “how come it's a surprise to you that this machine breaks down? It's not clean, the sensors aren’t clean, etc.” Always this this pointing at each other instead of ownership and collaboration. This is about the mindset. The mechanics are simply focused on repairs, preventive maintenance; and the operators are focusing on producing more and more items, and they just feel like it's not my job to clean the assets or to help prevent failures.
The reason behind that might even be the the incentives or the objectives of the departments. If the operations department is rewarded for produced items, and the maintenance team for performing prevent maintenance tasks, or the preventive-to-corrective ratio, then this is not a surprise. Instead, if you would make the operators responsible for cleaning the assets, it's more likely that they treat it with respect, and that will result in less failures.
And if you would reward both departments for a minimum unplanned downtime or a lower mean time to repair, then it's more likely that they start cooperating with each other to prevent failures or to set a quicker diagnose.
