industry
An hour of downtime costs more than the repair.
Planned maintenance and unplanned breakdowns competing for the same technicians, on lines that were never meant to stop.
what is different here
Planned work always loses to the line going down.
-
Preventive maintenance gets deferred
Every breakdown pulls a technician off scheduled work. The plan slips, and next month’s breakdowns were caused by the work that slipped.
in Etaprise → the schedule re-cuts instead of collapsing
-
The part is in a different store
Time is lost finding out whether the spare is in the main store, on a van, or on order, after the technician is already at the machine.
in Etaprise → stock visible before the job is assigned
-
Machine history lives in people’s heads
The person who knows what this line does at 3am is on leave, and the last fix was never written down anywhere findable.
in Etaprise → asset history on the work order itself
the setup
The modules that carry most of the weight here.
The other eleven are still there. Sector setup changes which forms attach to a job, which certifications gate an assignment, and what a closed job has to prove, not which software you are running.
On site
what a rollout looks like
In order, and with honest timings.
Manufacturing sites rarely have the luxury of a quiet period to implement in. The sequence below is built to be adopted around production rather than during a shutdown.
-
weeks 1–2
Reactive work first
Put breakdown and callout work on the system before touching preventive maintenance. It is the work causing the most pain and the least disruptive to change.
-
weeks 2–5
The asset register
Build up equipment records as jobs touch them: line, machine, sub-assembly. Do not stop production to do a data load; a maintenance cycle covers most of what matters.
-
weeks 4–8
Preventive maintenance on real usage
Once meters and condition data are arriving, move PM schedules off calendar dates and onto actual running hours and cycles.
-
ongoing
Knowledge and planning
Load manuals and past fixes so the machine remembers what the retiring technician knows. Then let scheduling balance planned work against the line going down.
questions from this sector
The objections we hear, answered plainly.
No software changes that, and anything claiming otherwise is selling. What it does is make the trade visible (which PM was dropped, how many times, and what it later cost), so the argument for resourcing is evidenced rather than felt.
Yes, and often it should. Where an ERP owns parts and purchasing, this consumes stock levels rather than duplicating them. Two systems both claiming to own inventory is the failure mode to avoid.
Operator-performed checks can be captured as forms against the same asset, so the history is complete even when a technician was not involved.
That is the normal starting point. Scanned manuals are readable and searchable; quality follows the scan. It will not be as good as clean documentation, and it is considerably better than a filing cabinet.
further reading
Further reading
Bring us a week of your jobs.
Bring a month of planned and unplanned work and we will run it through together.
Book a demoother industries