Maintenance Management Archives

Downtime in a plant or facility leads to lost productivity. It disrupts operations, causes maintenance staff to divert time from scheduled projects, and can have significant negative business implications, including lost revenue, significant unplanned expenses, missed deadlines and damage to a company’s reputation. To avoid these problems, manufacturers and facility and plant managers are moving away from traditional maintenance methods where you wait for something to break, and then you fix it. Reactive approaches like this result in disruptions and unplanned downtime. A better approach is preventive maintenance, which is a routine for periodically inspecting equipment with the goal of...

Augmented reality (AR) allows users to enhance their field of view with real-time superimposed digital information. The technology is now being more widely used in maintenance and repair operations, and its value is enhanced when complemented with data and historical knowledge from asset management systems. Using AR in maintenance and repair allows technicians to receive information about specific assets instantly. Similar to the way a person can use different monitors and projection devices to view data, an AR system would take data (in this case from an asset management system) and project it onto goggles or camera-enabled mobile devices for...

Asset tracking in supply chains is undergoing many changes that promise to deliver new benefits. Traditional asset tracking technologies like barcode and RFID ID are being supplemented or replaced with IOT enabled tracking methodologies. These new Internet of Things (IoT) devices can provide real-time tracking, as well as information on the condition of items in the field or in transit. Specifically, tracking tags and sensors can provide real-time location data about goods in transit or sitting in a warehouse. Additionally, some sensors can collect temperature and pressure data, or whether packaging is damaged. Unfortunately, many companies that use such sensors...

Today’s workplaces are dynamic. Workers come and go. When that happens, the experiences they’ve built up go also. The key is to retain the knowledge they have gained and keep it for others to use. How important is this issue? On average, about 20% of a company’s staff leaves in a given year. The numbers have steadily grown over the last five years. And more workers are expected to leave the workforce in the near future as about 10,000 Baby Boomers will reach the age of 65 every day for the next 15 years. Employees leaving for a different job...

Pivotal asset management technology helps companies stay in business during difficult economic times.