Today’s supply chain is more complex than ever before. Keeping products flowing smoothly requires a high level of visibility, communication, and coordination among all partners. To make things even more challenging, manufacturers are operating with leaner workforces and smaller inventories than ever before. This article focuses on the eBook that you can download later in this article.
Keeping operations running optimally in this new environment requires even more innovative maintenance practices that can be automated or semi-automated as much as possible to reduce the risk of unplanned outages and increase uptime from equipment that is often not fully utilized due to excess capacity. Here are five strategies for maintaining your supply chain today and in the future.
Smart Maintenance is Crucial for your Supply Chain
Similar to traditional maintenance models, smart maintenance models are both reactive and preventative. However, smart maintenance goes further with condition-based monitoring and predictive and cognitive maintenance.
Reactive Supply Chain Maintenance
A reactive maintenance approach works best for tools in the supply chain that will not cause major supply chain disruptions if they go down or if they are extremely unlikely to fail. This approach works best if you have workers trained to spot and fix the issue quickly and have backup parts and inventory.
Preventative Supply Chain Maintenance
The oldest, most refined approach on our list is preventative maintenance. Our favorite example of this approach is changing the oil in your vehicles every 3000 miles rather than 5000. The entire point of changing the oil at 3000 miles is to prevent damage to vehicles in the future. Preventative maintenance is best used on items that are in heavy use, expensive to replace, have many moving parts, and/or are crucial to the supply chain. For preventative maintenance to succeed, you will need a maintenance schedule, preventative methods for each item, and a dedicated maintenance team.
Remote Condition-Based Monitoring
This approach takes preventative maintenance into the 21st century by using wireless sensors to relay data to the maintenance teams. Thanks to these sensors, preventative maintenance becomes significantly more streamlined and accurate. Remote condition-based monitoring is most effective with items that are not subject to wear, don't suffer from random failures, or have conditions (temperatures, water/air pressure, vibrations) that your sensors are designed to measure.
Predictive Maintenance
Predictive maintenance is possible thanks to the groundwork laid down by remote condition-based monitoring. Due to the digital feedback loop created by sensors and the data they collect, you can predict equipment failure or maintenance in real-time. This allows you to predict failures before they happen and then prevent them. For predictive maintenance to be effective, you will need comprehensive training to ensure everyone on your team knows how your predictive maintenance system works.
Cognitive Maintenance
Cognitive maintenance is the most technologically advanced form of maintenance. In addition to keeping your equipment up and running, cognitive maintenance optimizes your workforce, production, and customer satisfaction rates. It does this by effectively eliminating downtime by predicting disruptions ahead of time using various analytics. If you are a company that has a high production capacity, large volumes of equipment, and understands the value of building business continuity with intelligent systems in place, you need to strive for a cognitive maintenance model.
Asset Management for Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain
Did you know that Dynamics 365 now has plant maintenance management (Enterprise Asset Management)? It has been out for a while, but we are still excited about this much-needed solution to add to the strong manufacturing capabilities within the Supply Chain Suite. The Enterprise Asset Management module is great for internal maintenance, but not for managing customer equipment repairs, which is why Clients First developed ProMRO for Dynamics 365 Finance and Supply Chain/Operations.
Learn More
Reach out to our team to find out more about Enterprise Asset Management and ProMRO. Contact us at 800.331.8382 or email info@cfbs-us.com.
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