Maintenance cards

The main task of the maintenance service is to maintain an efficient and safe mode of operation of key production assets. This list can include both pieces of equipment and infrastructure facilities. And for each asset of the enterprise there is a plan for carrying out routine maintenance – preventive, repair or emergency.

To organize and efficiently administer a huge list of tasks, Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) manuals are created. The process for developing such guidelines is complex and individual for each organization.

The manual covers all the responsibilities of the maintenance service:

– inspection and testing;

– accounting of the state of assets;

– engineering and modernization;

– preventive maintenance;

– planned and emergency repairs;

– construction;

– disposal of waste and surplus;

– major overhaul;

– electric installation work;

– security.

Many manufacturing enterprises, having evaluated the real volume of work in this direction, hastened to implement digital solutions for more efficient maintenance and repair management. Plant Engineering conducted a survey among representatives of the manufacturing industry in 2018. According to the results:

– 55% of enterprises use electronic cards and maintenance schedule;

– 53% plan to service using CMMS systems;

– 44% still trust paper bids and reports.

Let’s take a closer look at one of the solutions that can become the first step towards the digital transformation of the production maintenance service. We are talking about maintenance cards.

How do electronic maintenance charts work?

Maintenance cards are a digital tool that allows you to objectively assess the resource requirements for maintenance. An electronic card corresponds to each individual asset in the company. It contains comprehensive information about the tools and materials required for maintenance, the complexity of operations, the required qualifications of performers and other aspects.

Data from Maintenance cards are used both to form individual maintenance requests and to develop a global production service plan. Thus, MRO specialists always have the necessary resources at their disposal to maintain the operability of key assets and promptly resolve emergency situations.

The enterprise management, in turn, receives an effective tool for assessing service needs, analyzing key metrics and preventing risks.

Benefits of digital solutions

Today, paper forms and spreadsheets are hopelessly outdated. Such tools are not suitable for accounting and service management for a number of reasons.

First, without data standardization, there is no chance of integrating such information into systems for automated management and planning. This means that the enterprise will be cut off from solutions in the field of digital transformation of production.

Second, eCards can provide several valuable benefits:

– efficient performance of the work order due to the availability of technical information, including from mobile devices;

– an objective assessment of the impact of service on business processes by increasing the visibility of data;

– fast response rate to requests for maintenance and repair due to the automation of the process of creating work orders;

– reducing the cost of storing and administering databases, optimizing the cost of material support of the service.

In the future, Maintenance cards allow you to track not only resource requirements, but also such characteristics as:

– Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE);

– mean time between failures (MTBF);

– mean time to repair or replace (MTTR).

SmartEAM provides software and hardware solutions to transform this data into enterprise value. With the help of our products, you can build a management system for end-to-end business processes or create a cost-effective service strategy focused on reliability.

Clear metrics and measurable results

Since we are talking about business processes related to maintenance, it is worth talking more about the role of Maintenance cards in the analysis of KPIs.

Important metrics are directly extracted from electronic maintenance cards, which allows you to set specific KPIs and track their achievement:

Compliance with service schedules. The head of the service gets access to the log of work orders, can prescribe norms for individual operations and pieces of equipment, analyze compliance with the schedule and the percentage of work done.
Reduced maintenance costs. You can optimize your preventive maintenance strategy by analyzing statistics for individual asset failures, personnel costs, or the cost of used parts.
Increased runtime to failure. Valuable KPI that can also be learned from maintenance cards. To do this, it is necessary to interpret the data on the average time between breakdowns and downtime. If reactive maintenance takes precedence over preventive maintenance, it is worth working on more effective planning.

These are just three metrics that Maintenance cards allow you to work with. The digital tool can also be used to monitor various trends and progressively optimize operational processes.