INDUSTRY 4.0
CHRIS EVANS: HERE’ S WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU GET IT WRONG
Not staying on top of these critical maintenance challenges will inevitably increase unwanted downtime and affect overall plant efficiency and performance. Alongside this, the knock-on effect of interruptions to a particular shift’ s performance can have a detrimental effect on morale and lead to increased sick days and staff churn.
An inefficient operating plant will also consume greater amounts of energy, which increases costs and affects a company’ s carbon footprint and green credentials.
Taking these challenges into account, it is imperative that key plant personnel evaluate their supply chains and ensure they are working with a trusted life cycle partner that can work with them throughout the manufacturing lifecycle.
As part of this, decision makers in this area need to review prospective partners and analyse the range of added value services they can offer to deal with these critical maintenance issues, and offer related services to help maintain production, develop people and drive down costs.
One crucial aspect of this is ensuring contracted, 24 / 7 telephone support and engineer callout is available to help alleviate the potential lack of resources within stretched site maintenance teams. Obsolescence reporting and legacy migration solutions should also be delivered as part of an agreed upgrade plan that will, over time, remove the risk of obsolescence from the plant.
Concurrently, flexible inventory management options can improve business cash flow and reduce carbon footprint, as well as provide availability and accessibility to the correct profile of tested spare parts.
Energy also continues to be a major cost to any business, and understanding a plant’ s energy footprint and highlighting‘ hot spots’ can be achieved through power quality measurement and energy audits. Solutions can then be deployed to mitigate the problem areas and deliver a more energy-efficient plant.
Finally, developing and retaining people is extremely important, so evolving training programmes to meet the needs of the individual and the business are essential to creating a motivated and driven workforce.
Chris Evans, Strategic Development
Manager, Mitsubishi Electric