How can organizations achieve Maintenance 4.0?

The future of maintenance is just 3 steps away

Maintenance is a function that contributes to every business process and operation, keeping critical assets running at top performance. If you fall behind on your maintenance activities, you’ll fall behind on your uptime, safety, and customer commitments. Implementing new and more effective solutions for your maintenance department, by embracing Maintenance 4.0 for example, is the key to supporting this critical element of your business. However, installing a new method of work can be complicated - especially if you don’t know the best ways to do it.

In this blog, we’ll show you how to implement maintenance 4.0 for your own operations. With the steps below, you’ll go from trying to keep up with maintenance to getting it done faster, smarter and more effectively.

What is maintenance 4.0?

Before we get into how maintenance 4.0 works, it’s a good idea to get a firm understanding of what we mean when using the term.

Organizations from across the spectrum are entering into a new age of productivity and industry. Automation, robotics, machine learning, AI and more are all contributing to a fast-paced and highly productive business environment. We’ve come to know this fourth industrial revolution as ‘Industry 4.0’

As mentioned above, maintenance plays a critical role in asset-intensive industries, and as such, needs to find new mechanisms, processes and systems to keep up with Industry 4.0. This is where the concept of maintenance 4.0 comes in. It consists of using technology as a connector between machines, operations, equipment and people. With these 4.0 technologies, maintenance becomes simpler and is easier to control or monitor operations. It ultimately aims to simplify maintenance and make it more intelligent at the same time.

How can I implement maintenance 4.0?

To implement Maintenance 4.0 strategies, several core architecture elements must be in place to form the foundation required to realize M4.0 strategies. Getting the right technology alignment, preparing concise data management and approaching the task with a sound strategy are all essential to get started.

Below, we’ll highlight 3 steps you can take to start implementing maintenance 4.0 for your own operations.

STEP ONE - Create a logical Master Data Management plan

To achieve Maintenance 4.0, where technology enabled data notifies teams of potential issues and automates effective corrective actions before downtime, companies should formulate strategies to realize this vision. The first step towards this goal is creating a Master Data Management plan.
Master Data Management (and similarly the Common Data Environment (CDE) in ISO 19650) is core to achieving the connectivity required to compile data from technology sources like sensors. It collects the data and makes logical sense of what it means in terms of the operation and the assets to which it is associated.
Without a logical Master Data Management plan, the data cannot be correctly deciphered and converted into information, leading to a lack of confidence or even more confusion. Thus it is critical to create a logical Master Data Management plan to begin implementing Maintenance 4.0 technology and systems, and is the first logical step.

STEP TWO - Connect technology to data

Information, whether it be data, insights, or business feedback, requires structure to link the data in a logical and usable fashion. This is the only way to turn that data into practical implementations and business intelligence. Your Master Data Management plan needs to link sensory and operational data to the appropriate asset in your EAM system (like IBM Maximo). Similarly, the documents, documents, and photos created in your Engineering, EAM, and ERP systems must be organized, stored, and presented for it to be actionable.

In other words, Master Data Management within the EAM system provides the backbone to compile related data sources, while Enterprise Content Management (ECM) provides the means to store, render, and share information so appropriate maintenance actions can be performed. This is how you connect your data to identify maintenance and operational tasks.

STEP THREE - Leverage insights to make impactful decisions

While automation is great for simple tasks, big decisions still require people - and data is at the core of informing them. If data is structured well, organized and trusted, meaningful decisions can be made that impact your organization’s bottom line.
Using the insights generated by sensory feedback and connecting it to documentation, leaders can prioritize assets, identify optimization opportunities and make strategic, future-thinking decisions.

By combining systems, assets, and data, management can schedule repairs and order parts ahead of schedule, and trace failure to the original root cause thereby eliminating guesswork and trial and error.

Join the evolution of maintenance

Maintenance 4.0 is a huge step for asset-intensive organizations. It enables you to perform maintenance faster, more efficiently and more accurately than ever before. With Maintenance 4.0, you can finally leverage high tech concepts like AI and automated troubleshooting to boost the productivity of your operation.
However, the great challenge of the 4.0 revolution is finding ways to interconnect existing processes. For many organizations, using data as a connector between machines, operations, equipment and people is a complicated process. Without doing so, they will never have a clear vision of what is really happening and be able to mature into a more innovative and cost effective operations team. Qellus is able to directly assist these organizations, preparing their ECM and EAM systems for better and more advanced maintenance insights.

Contact us today. We’ll outline where you can find substantial gains in your maintenance procedures and help you implement maintenance 4.0, today.