CMMS Case Study: Aerospace Manufacturer Drives Availability & Uptime

As global competitors fight for new business the importance of uptime in their factories and responsiveness to downtime events has never been more important. To accomplish this, manufacturing organizations and their support groups have to work together as never before analyzing, reporting, responding, executing, and driving improvement to the resilience of their operations.  See how one company is winning the battle with a Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS), Scireo ServiceTRM fully integrated with our award-winning enterprise asset management solutions. 

The Challenge: No Systemic Approach

The company’s factory didn’t have a reliable way of measuring key performance indicators for the production environment.  Instead of a Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS), they had ad hoc processes and spreadsheets. With no fact-based way to measure Downtime, Return to Service, Mean-Time-Between-Failure, and incident Response Time, they were left with only anecdotal information.  They had no way to measure prioritize improvements, capital investments, or required staffing levels.  Acquiring funding for projects was difficult and satisfying customers impossible. 

While factory management believed they were not getting the level of support they needed, they didn’t have the capabilities in place to measure and take focused action.  The factory support team was also frustrated because they believed they were doing their best, and they too didn’t have a way to measure their own performance to prove it.  With no fact-based way to assess the underlying problems that were negatively impacting their performance and, as a result, the performance of the production facility, both the factory and their support group were not happy.

The support group believed that equipment needed to be maintained better, upgraded, or replaced – and even when Factory management agreed, there wasn’t an effective way to assess the impact or justify the investment of time or money to do so.

Because Factory management and the support team were basing their decisions on anecdotal information, emerging trends could not be analyzed leaving them focusing on the “crisis of the day”.  This form of “fire fighting” results in a reactive team that just “does their best to keep up”.  This meant that production schedules were interrupted too often and promises to customers were either missed or it took costly, and sometimes herculean, efforts to make up for lost production time.

Neither group had an effective and standard way to measure the current performance levels for either the equipment or the support teams. ServiceTRM CMMS helped them solve this problem.

• Implementation of ResourceTRM provided the ability to easily access and arrange critical data using the Action Grid capability
• Implementation of ServiceTRM CMMS focused the team on their customer and standardized several critical but ad hoc workflows
  • A simple, structured request form makes it easy to report factory support issues and increased adoption.
  • Support groups who were often out of their office could be notified through both email and text.  Once they acknowledged the request for support the factory knew they were engaged.
  • When responses were outside the agreed-to standards, automated escalations and notifications were triggered 
  • When support teams needed help from other functions those activities could be tracked in ServiceTRM as well
• ServiceTRM Management Consoles provided the facts the factory and support team had been after
  • Facts are organized graphically on the consoles to be able to easily compare performance results
  • Downtime issues are tracked, categorized and analyzed to surface any systemic or high leverage actions
  • Console details could be drilled into enabling very specific analysis and action to take place

The Results

• Within days the Factory was able to measure key performance indicators at the click of a button using Flexible Analytics and Sente Management Consoles
• Management practices were put in place to use these new KPIs to drive improvement actions with the following results
  • Response Time to costly production breakdowns was reduced by 85%
  • Downtime was reduced by 30%
  • Return to Service time was improved by over 21%
  • Labor reduction for tracking and reporting issues was reduced by 15%
• Access to a broad, enterprise-wide network of easily searchable test equipment helped where equipment couldn’t be fixed fast enough
• The relationship between the factory and their support group has greatly improved as a function of visibility to fact-based performance improvements