The integration of Wonderware's Avantis.AM (a Maintenancesuite component) with Factorysuite, provides manufacturers with realtime insight and control over their production assets. No longer is preventative maintenance an isolated application. It can now be an integrated part of any manufacturer's production processes.
In summarising the closing decade of the last century insofar as business computing is concerned: the Y2K monster has fizzled out without so much as a whimper; the ERP bloom has reached its peak and so has EAM (enterprise asset management). Both ERP and EAM, however, have largely under-performed.
Traditional EAM vendors stopped focusing on maintenance because the direction functionality should take was largely driven by the financial community. All the focus was on E-MRO (enterprise maintenance, repair and operations) which actually failed to empower operators or maintenance personnel to do their job.
"Since companies can spend 30 to 40% of their operating costs on MRO expenses, it is fair to say that asset management can play a key and vital role in the formulation of a company's bottom line or how well it satisfies customer demands," says Ian Huntly, Business Development Manager at Futuristix-Wonderware. "This is achieved through improved manpower utilisation, extended asset life, the ability to decide whether to repair or replace, reduced MRO inventory costs, improved MRO procurement efficiency, quality improvements and finally, improved environmental and safety compliance."
The world is becoming a very competitive place where the focus of manufacturers is on increasing profitability, lowering total cost of ownership on assets (plants and facilities), improving asset uptime, capacity and quality while maintaining strong customer relationships.
The way to do this is through timely and accurate information that helps decision makers manage the business. The problem is that information is more often than not scattered across different systems, not available when required, not up to date or accurate and not accessible to the right people.
"MaintenanceSuite is designed to address these key issues head on by making asset management a continuous realtime, scada-integrated process rather than something that happens 'over there'," says Futuristix MD, Mike le Plastrier. "By being the rule rather than the exception, asset management through preventative maintenance cannot help but ensure maximum production capacity by improving asset uptime. It can also play a key role in helping to improve the cooperation between production and maintenance through a proactive rather than reactive approach to potential problems."
Avantis.AM is an asset management software application that tracks asset information (eg costs, statistics, etc), assists with work management (eg routine and preventive maintenance, scheduling, etc) and that also manages spare parts (MRO Inventory) as well as the procurement of materials and services.
The Avantis.AM asset management software comprises five separate functional focus points:
* Maintenance.
* Inventory.
* Procurement.
* Foundation (desktop customisation for specific users, security profiles as well as help and documentation).
* Factorysuite integration Avantis is a condition-based system that schedules maintenance on necessity rather than planned intervals.
This reduces unnecessary and expensive decommissioning while providing ample warning of potential malfunctions.
It can do so because it monitors equipment performance in realtime and continuously over long periods. Its integration with Factorysuite's Intouch process visualisation application provides users with another seamless level of supervisory capability for the word's most popular realtime scada application.
Avantis.AM information is accessed directly from within Intouch to provide information and functionality that includes:
* Work order history.
* Backlog information.
* Work schedules.
* Failure history.
* Spare parts and related components.
* Material delivery schedules.
* Safety information.
* Entering purchase requisitions and work requests.
Preventative maintenance has come a long way - and it has had to. PM, like most other applications is finding a logical home in a bottoms-up approach to manufacturing because it makes sense in a unified and integrated context that focuses on efficiency and profitability. It does not make sense in isolation of realtime production supervision because that is where reality happens.
© Technews Publishing (Pty) Ltd | All Rights Reserved
printer friendly version