In 2008 the company I work for, Precise (a developer of application performance management systems), was spun out of its parent company Symantec and into a private company. Suddenly, we had 1,000 customers to support, and a limited IT department. Symantec offered to sell us licenses for SAP and other enterprise software packages that we had been using. But in our new structure, we needed applications that were scaled down and easier to support. We ditched the world of licensed software and annual commitments to large capital expenses on equipment — the traditional way of doing IT — in favor of cloud, SaaS and virtualization.

The award is based on the percentage of the company’s eligible aviation maintenance technicians (“AMTs”) who complete a minimum amount of initial and recurrent training during the year. Of Mesa’s 221 eligible maintenance professionals, 195 — or 88 percent — received an individual AMT Award for 2011. The award provides maintenance technicians with incentives to improve safety by actively participating in initial and recurring training programs on their own initiative or in training programs subsidized by their employers.

Failure codes illustrate why an asset failed during production. Additionally, a failure code applied to a work order marks an instance of a particular failure behavior. The use of codes in a CMMS system ensures a consistent way of documenting the key aspects of the failure event according to pre-defined categories. Some examples include:

• Breakage
• Corrosion
• Imbalance
• Misalignment
• Overheating
• Vibration

Why are they used?

Failure codes are used in mining data in preventive maintenance software, which in turn makes subsequent analysis possible, which leads to net improved system availability. For example, the number of times an instance of a particular failure code occurs, divided by the total operating age of the equipment, approximates the failure rate. For maintenance organizations that don’t use failure codes, determining any sort of failure trend is a labor-intensive process of searching through work orders and making several educated guesses.

Why should you use them?

Knowing the failure rate for a failure code can help in doing the following:

• Optimize PM intervals
• Assess desirability of additional PM tasks
• Eliminate unnecessary PM tasks
• Improve failure response
• Improve work practices

The consistent use of the failure codes provides a convenient method of getting statistics about equipment failures or breakdowns. They aid your ability to effectively identify trends and problems. Let’s say that you have a fleet of similar machines. You could run a report for a period of time and, by selecting a failure code, determine how many times the failure occurs on an individual system. You can then compare this data across the entire fleet. If the failure rate is above average, it may be worthwhile proactively replacing parts or shortening the PM interval.

Having the correct codes and will also generate the types of reports and statistics that you require whether you are looking to improve OEE, or to implement a 6-Sigma or TPM program. These statistics are invaluable in any continuous improvement program. Codes can also help spot trends with work practices that cause the failures. For example, let’s say that you have equipment that has problems with contamination. You could run a report for a period of time and determine how many times your machine has had contamination problems. It could turn out the contamination is caused by a single technician who is over lubricating moving parts.

Who should input the codes?

Ideally, it is best to have the data entered correctly closer to the event by those who investigated and corrected the failure. In most cases, this is the technician that responds to the failure.

How many should you have?

Failure codes should provide an easy way to quickly analyze equipment failures, problems and faults. Without doubt, effective and accurate code lists are required for identifying trends but deciding what selection choices to place on such pick lists is no trivial matter. Too few and they would not support the level of data analysis desired or the data will be meaningless. Equally if there are too many options, technicians tend to suffer from “choice overload” and the default will become either the “Miscellaneous” or “Other” option, which will again render the data meaningless. Ideally, you should aim for 20-30 failure codes. Pop-up tables in the CMMS eliminate the need to memorize codes.

Who should develop them?

These codes should be easily available and understandable to the people who request work, to the maintenance personnel that complete the work and to the engineers who want to get the data they need to understand what is occurring in the field. Fault coding development really requires an integrated approach with these 3 groups, especially if there is a desire to do some sort of wide ranging analysis. Ultimately, the codes have to allow the field personnel a relatively painless way to provide the information that the engineers need. Unless that occurs, the end product will not be used.

Conclusion

In general, we collect failure codes for the purpose of analysis. Analysis, in turn, provides knowledge of equipment failure behavior patterns with respect to other external and internal factors such as “working” age, PM frequency, EHM parameters and decision models, operational tradeoffs etc. We can then use this knowledge to improve system availability and ultimately, the company’s bottom line.

]]> http://www.maintenanceassistant.com/blog/cmms-failure-codes/feed/ 0 http://www.maintenanceassistant.com/blog/cmms-spreadsheets/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=cmms-spreadsheets http://www.maintenanceassistant.com/blog/cmms-spreadsheets/#comments Tue, 14 Feb 2012 21:39:14 +0000 Jeffrey O'Brien http://www.maintenanceassistant.com/?p=3696 Continue Reading]]>

Companies who recognize the value of a cost-effective approach to maintenance usually start with a maintenance strategy that involves inputting maintenance management data into a homemade maintenance spreadsheet. Spreadsheets let you log work orders, document upcoming maintenance cycles and use filters to manipulate the data and produce nice lists of work completed, however, maintenance managers and technicians must rely on other systems like email, phone, pagers, documents, calendars, offline trackers, schematics, manuals, or even post-it notes. Whilst adding more value than a paper-based solution, this approach has obvious limitations.

On the other hand, Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS), sometimes called Preventive Maintenance Software, enables the facility manager, subordinates and customers to track the status of maintenance work on their assets and the associated costs of that work in one comprehensive system. You can digitize and streamline your maintenance operations by consolidating personnel, documents, assets, data, work logs and inventory in one location. Feeding all maintenance information directly into a CMMS solution facilitates the automatic manipulation of data to enable operational, technical, and economical analysis such as repair V replace. It also generates graphical reporting to provide evidence of effective maintenance.

Advantages of a CMMS over Spreadsheets

1. Automated PM triggers – Preventive maintenance software helps reduce human error by ensuring PM’s are triggered when they are due in compliance with regulatory or manufacturer’s requirements. A good CMMS system can also activate PM’s based on a number of triggers including time, meter and event.
2. Auditing & Compliance – A CMMS system digitizes your paper trail. Work Orders are documented electronically as you go, which makes auditing a breeze.
3. Analysis & Reporting – Typically, a CMMS system will report key performance indicators (KPI’s) such as MTBF, MTTR and availability with little effort. KPI’s are used in evaluating the effectiveness of the current operations, for making organizational and personnel decisions and for determining the repair or replace of assets. Built in reports enable you to refine maintenance processes and improve asset availability; improving your bottom line.
4. Access anywhere – Typically, the spreadsheet will reside on a personal drive with limited access behind a corporate firewall. In a cloud based CMMS system, the data is stored on a remote server and can be accessed from anywhere over the Internet. Modern-day CMMS systems come with mobile versions so you can access your CMMS on your smart device in the field.
5. Centralize your efforts – MA assists the facilities maintenance manager with work reception, planning, control, forecasting, performance, evaluation, and reporting in one system.
6. Real time information – The CMMS keeps you apprised of your organization’s maintenance activities in real time. Managers can see which assets are offline, who is working on what and what still needs to be done.
7. Communication – Work requests submitted into the system can be routed to the correct people instantly. Technicians receive notifications automatically so they know what work is due.
8. Centralized Database – The CMMS system offers a one-stop database of all equipment information, documents, manuals, schematics and images and materials. No need for your technicians to carry around bulky schematics or manuals.
9. Supply Chain Management– A CMMS system will automatically track parts inventory, manage suppliers and vendors effortlessly and help you keep inventory costs optimized. When parts are consumed during work orders, the CMMS depletes stock levels in real time. No need to go back to the desk and update those stock cards. If stock falls below minimum levels, the system will notify the required users or suppliers to start the re-ordering process. Stock outs can be a thing of the past!

Conclusion

The purpose of implementing a maintenance strategy is to minimize costs associated with downtime, stocking parts, and management reporting time. The choice is simple – spend months building a cumbersome yet inadequate spreadsheet that takes a week to open with its complex macros and triggers or select a simple to use, cloud based CMMS system. Why reinvent the wheel? Many CMMS systems can be customized to suit your maintenance processes, no matter what size your organization. A CMMS can be effectively deployed by any business in any market sector for efficient asset management.

I’m going to go slightly off topic this week and talk about something not directly related to the CMMS industry. Matt’s plight turned out to be a very illuminating story about the ways of the enterprise software company – it serves as a cautionary tale for others.

Flashback to 6 months ago, when Matt’s company – a Toronto based engineering firm, was looking to implement an email filtering system to bolster their security.  Company X sells them a $2000 server that will do the trick.  It’s about double the price of another solution that would do the same thing, but this one comes with local tech support.  But, $2K is a drop in the bucket for a company like this.

Server configuration and tech support comes from Company Y, the only company in the province that does this. Company Y sets up the $2K box, but also installs their proprietary software on the server, for the purposes of monitoring network outages. This is so they can provide better support – at least that’s what they tell people.

As it turns out, their network monitoring software was pinging a server in Malaysia, where Company Y had subcontracted all of the actual server monitoring.  What this meant, Matt learned after a few months, was that the average response time for a server outage event was two days – to Malaysia, and back.  But that’s not the worst part.

Eventually there is a server complication that is so bad it shuts down the email client for an entire day, which is what kept Matt, and by association myself, up past 2AM.  He walked into the office that morning to find that email was down for everyone in his office. He calls Company Y, whose faulty monitoring software still hasn’t received the outage report.  He cracks open the server, which has a boot-level password on it – set up by Company Y.  Meaning, “You don’t get to play around with this, even though you paid for it.”  Which really means, “Get out your cheque book and give us a call.”  Fast forward a few hours and he’s on hold to Jakarta, trying to get them to send him the outage report, so he can send it to Company Y.  Nightmare.

Matt shoots an email to Company Y to complain about, among other things, their roundabout tech support and boot-protecting the server which prevented Matt from correcting the problem.  And then fire rained down.

They responded with an email to Matt and his boss, calling him incompetent, unqualified for his job and basically tried to pin the whole network outage on his shoulders.

Matt’s boss rolls in the next day, reads the email and calls Matt into his office.  ”You believe these guys?” is essentially the sentiment he expressed. The boss’s conversation with Company Y resembled this:

“Regardless of how you feel about Matt, this is a problem created by your service and we feel that you’re responsible for fixing it.”

To which they haughtily replied, “We can’t even look at the problem until you sign up for a full suite of our services.”

The $2K that was once a drop in the bucket is now looking more like a leaky faucet.

“Forget these guys. We’re not doing business with them anymore.”

It took Matt a week on the phone with HP and $1500 in parts to eventually crack the box and fix the issue.  Which was bittersweet, because 4 weeks later they were installing a different system anyway.

After the ordeal was over, one sentiment kept cropping up over and over whenever Matt and I talk about this.  That Company Y had operated more like a cartel than a service company.  That their business model wasn’t based on loyal customers and repeat business, but on the method of drawing you in and making it too expensive to consider leaving.  They make so much money on services they WANT their software to break.  Aron Levie explains how software companies have operated like this for years.

But SaaS is changing that.  Not overnight, and not completely.  But simply by virtue of it being Software as a Service, it puts more power in the consumers hand, and makes harder for software companies to exploit you unfairly.

]]> http://www.maintenanceassistant.com/blog/enterprise-software-companies-wolf-sheeps-clothing/feed/ 0 http://www.maintenanceassistant.com/industry/hamilton-plant-fined-55000-worker-injured/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=hamilton-plant-fined-55000-worker-injured http://www.maintenanceassistant.com/industry/hamilton-plant-fined-55000-worker-injured/#comments Mon, 13 Feb 2012 20:47:36 +0000 Nathanael Montgomery http://www.maintenanceassistant.com/?p=3848 Continue Reading]]> Hamilton, ON – Gates Canada Inc., an Alberta automotive part manufacturer, was fined $55,000 for a violation of the Ontario Occupational Health and Safety Act after a worker was injured.

On April 12, 2010, at the company’s workplace in Hamilton, workers were clearing pallets that had jammed on an assembly line. One worker had a hand on the conveyor of a machine when part of the machine cycled down, crushing the worker’s hand and causing muscle damage.

But that may soon end with the announcement last week that American plans to close its Alliance Fort Worth maintenance base and outsource the work performed on wide-body aircraft such as the Boeing 767 and 777.

Over the past decade, U.S. carriers have increasingly sent big planes to facilities in Singapore, China and Mexico for maintenance. Some, like Southwest Airlines, send narrow-body aircraft to maintenance bases in El Salvador and Canada.

But even as China defied expectations that its factory output would contract in January and German output improved for the first time in four months, the data released on Wednesday showed new signs of the threats from Europe’s troubles.

And there is welcome news for plant engineers and technicians, with 55% of respondents stating that they are planning to tackle the economic slump by increasing investment in predictive maintenance technologies aimed at extending plant longevity, improving efficiency and avoiding catastrophic and very costly plant failures.

Wedbush says that the commercial MRO market was valued at approximately $45 billion at the end of 2011, which is lower than the $47 billion peak in 2007. The research firm expects MRO sales to grow 5-6% in 2012. However, the extent of MRO growth this year will be about 10% slower than that seen last year, according to the firm.