The process of maintenance over the years has evolved based on the circumstances and the technological advancement in the manufacturing process. When the manufacturing process started to invest in machineries and equipment to take over from the manual process, the maintenance concept was limited to maintain the equipment once it breaks down. Over the years as manufacturing process started to use new technologies and increase in production activity, the maintenance concept shifted to planned preventive maintenance. The objective is to achieve maximum efficiency (OEE) in production and to drive major cost savings in maintenance. Today, preventive and predictive maintenance planning is the norms in industrial equipment maintenance process and it is a standard condition to stay competitive in the market.  To execute any maintenance strategy several software tools help to reduce the manual errors, lethargy in scheduling of maintenance activity, creating maintenance notifications and recordi

A comparison between SAP PM* and CMMS  *R ecently the SAP PM modules has been reviewed and reinforced with new functionalities becoming SAP EAM (SAP Enterprise Asset Management). In this article, I will use SAP PM and SAP EAM referring to same SAP module. Industries across the globe use different software and tools to manage various business processes within the organization including accounting, human resources, purchasing, production and maintenance. Some may use different standalone tools for each purpose and some may use an integrated package like an ERP to manage all purposes. One of the most popular ERP is SAP, and SAP PM is the specific module used to manage and run maintenance in an industry. In addition, on the shelf, there are available many CMMS software for the maintenance management. The choice of SAP, CMMS and other in-house software to manage maintenance activities depends on many factors. SAP PM (for those that run SAP) and various vendors of CMMS are used commonly in t

Cost of maintenance  It's inevitable that every machine can malfunction. However, there are failures that can have very serious repercussions on production, on the machinery itself and unfortunately also injure the operators. Good maintenance can help to significantly reduce these risks and a good practice is to allocate a dedicated maintenance budget annually.  This budget should cover the costs incurred for materials, spare parts, labour and services. Therefore, if proper maintenance is planned and carried out, fewer failures will occur, a better Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) can be achieved and overheads on production costs can be reduced. Production overheads that have to take into account are both the above mentioned maintenance costs, and also the cost of production loss, which in the end is the highest price a process line pays when it is breakdown for a failure. In production lines for commodity production it is estimated that one hour of downtime can cost several thousa

5 reasons to embrace digital manufacturing Digital manufacturing is becoming an attractive concept with the development of digital technology. It is uniquely designed for the improvement in operational efficiencies, inventory control, supply chain planning, operations, compliance requirement and industrial internet of things ( IIOT ). Digital manufacturing enhances productivity, consistency, quality, connectivity, and automation intelligence. Additionally, it is efficient in lower manufacturing cost and makes companies competitive. Here we will discuss 5 reasons to transform the industrial operations with digital manufacturing. 1. Improved processes enhance the operational efficiency  Instead of traditional manual processes, it is better to utilize automated and cloud-based solutions that help in streamlining the process flow, performance, decision-making capabilities, cost rework conditions, and performance monitoring. These methods help in improving the quality of services