Their maintenance process involves the following 4 major steps:

(a) Based on an approximate estimate of the production volume, and therefore asset       utilization, a date from the calendar, or a day of the week in a month (say, first       Monday of every month), is chosen for scheduling a Preventative Maintenance Order       (PMO) for an asset or a group of assets. This is done by manual entry into a       maintenance application running on an enterprise system;

(a) Calendar Based Scheduling of Preventative Maintenance

(b) On the day of the scheduled maintenance, the PMO is released to the maintenance      department;

(c) The maintenance personnel perform maintenance activities on the asset as per a      maintenance plan that is also provided by the maintenance application running on the      enterprise system;

(d) After the maintenance activities are completed, the maintenance personnel “close” the      PMO by entering the details of the maintenance activities performed in the      maintenance application.

In this process there are certain problems:

  The use of time or calendar based maintenance schedules results in either “under      maintenance” or “over maintenance” – both of which are costly options.

  There is no warning of a breakdown or failure in this process – and diagnostic action      occurs as part of “unplanned maintenance” only after a breakdown occurs – resulting in      downtimes and much higher costs of diagnosis and rectification.

There is no “learning” from previous experiences to affect Proactive Maintenance in this     process.Therefore, even though there is knowledge gained, this is not stored and reused    in a systematic way to improve the performance of the asset and reduce the cost    of ownership.

There is a need for manual entries of failures when they occur unexpectedly to trigger a     PMO.This is a non-value adding activity of production labor.

The shop floor personnel do not get up- to-date status information on a maintenance    activity that should take place on a broken down asset until the order is closed. The    events that occur, and the time spent between the maintenance order generation and    order closure is not tracked.

.. So, how can Enterprise Maintenance Gateway help in addressing these problems?

(a) First of all, using Enterprise Maintenance Gateway, maintenance is planned based on actual usage as opposed to “time”.

   That is, instead of a calendar based PMO, a PMO based on Production Counts can be    defined. Therefore, situations, such as, drastic and unexpected changes in the    production volume that result in “under maintenance” or “over maintenance” are    eliminated and replaced by an “optimal maintenance” process.

   In other words, as shown in the figure above, a certain threshold value of Production    Counts for triggering a PMO can be set for various assets using an interactive graphical    user-interface and the system can monitor the activity of the assets for reaching the said    threshold values. In the example, three assets are shown to be connected to Visual    Plant enterprise maintenance gateway and the real time feed of the production counts      are monitored    for reaching the three respective threshold values of 10,000, 5,000 and    6,000 respectively. Upon reaching any of these thresholds, the gateway        automatically initiates  a PMO generation for that particular asset in the enterprise asset    management system    (like SAP, Maximo, etc.). The maintenance staff, upon executing    the PMO, “closes” the  order in the enterprise system. The closure is communicated    automatically to Enterprise Maintenance Gateway for reset of its counters to start    counting the production runs again for the next  maintenance cycle.

   The problem of “over-maintenance” or “under-maintenance” is thus eliminated.

(b) Predictive Maintenance - Warning of imminent failures, degrading trends of asset    performance, asset health, etc., can be tracked by the system and appropriate    proactive”as opposed to  “reactive” actions can be generated automatically to avoid    failures.

   List of failures, failure categories along with failure codes for various assets are normally    available in plants in a Microsoft Excel format or Lotus Notes. The excel sheet or Lotus    Notes can be automatically imported into the enterprise maintenance gateway               module using an interactive wizard inside the gateway.

   Once the failure list is imported, the gateway can start “watching” for those failure    conditions emerging – but not yet occurring! When such conditions emerge, quick    proactive action can be taken automatically based on a Proactive Maintenance strategy    defined for that particular asset.

   By being proactive in this manner, the cost of the unplanned maintenance activity is    minimized – otherwise, in the conventional approach, the failure would have occurred    resulting in a greater damage to the asset and larger costs of recovery.

   (c) Elimination of duplication of manual entries.

   Large manufacturing companies invest in different software systems for plant floor    operations and enterprise systems operations. However, most of the business processes    of manufacturing plants, such as maintenance, transcend the two environments, namely,    the plant floor and the enterprise. And typically, the software systems in the enterprise    side (enterprise systems) are not seamlessly integrated to the plant floor manufacturing    execution systems. This will lead to unnecessary data entry by human operators in order    to continue the business process in the second software application that is partially    completed in the first software application. For example, if production counts based    maintenance order has to be generated in the enterprise side, then, a human operator    has to enter the production counts of the assets in the enterprise system (as read from    the counters in the control system in the plant floor) every hour or end of a shift or end of    a day! This is unrealistic to achieve and that has been one of the reasons for most    maintenance operations occurring based on calendar dates or time.

   Enterprise  Maintenance Gateway monitors the production count and generates a work   order inside any  third party enterprise system in real time and automatically without the   need for a manual input in between.