In this blog series, we’ve shared the best practices and benefits of leveraging a modular approach to service transformation. In today’s blog, I will share why proactive maintenance is your gateway to deliver the right service at the right time to increase your equipment uptime.

In today’s equipment-centric world, it has been estimated that poor maintenance strategies can drive down a manufacturer plants’ capacity by 20 percent due to downtime. Recent studies show that unplanned downtime costs industrial manufacturers an estimated $50 billion annually. However, I believe these annual downtime costs are low when you consider that it costs manufacturers up to $260,000 per hour of unplanned downtime.

Today’s world is becoming more digital each passing year. It’s no longer about scheduling the same maintenance work each month but it is now about working smarter with equipment data to ensure your proactive maintenance programs are effective in improving the uptime of your equipment.

We also recommend that your field service management solution have the ability to create and tailor maintenance plans for automatic service requests, and configure reusable tasks and parts lists across your preventive maintenance plans either by location or assets. To simplify these steps, it’s helpful to automate work orders and case creation that auto-assigns work to technicians or crews, who work either as employees or third-party contractors.

The next step in your drive to improve equipment uptime will be to move along the proactive service continuum from reactive service to time-based maintenance, then to asset condition and finally to predictive maintenance service.

Moving away from reactive or “run to ground” maintenance strategies extend asset life, reduces opportunity costs, and increases customer satisfaction and loyalty. In fact, we’ve seen that 5 percent to 20 percent of overall equipment productive capacity is lost due to poor maintenance strategies.

However, to stop losing productive capacity and gain that 20 percent which might make your chief financial officer and chief service officer a bit happier, it will require capturing and leveraging IoT data.

But IoT data alone is not enough.

As the cost of sensors become less expensive, generating data is not the problem. The issue is scaling your maintenance and service operations to process and derive actionable information from your equipment data.

Just think, a normal oil refinery or a thermal power plant generates one (1) terabyte of data each and every day. Or a 787 jet engine flight that generates 500GB of engine data per flight. It’s not possible for a service technician or engineer to sift through this data and develop a maintenance plan on how to service these assets.

That’s why companies leveraging IoT data rely on data technology — for example, Hadoop, AWS EC2 or S3, and the Microsoft Azure data platform — to analyze the data generated by multiple systems, including IoT and then leverage analytics, reports, and dashboards to determine which equipment or asset requires proactive maintenance and how to prioritize that work; while integrating with a service execution management solution.

To make this happen, ServiceMax platform integrates with any data analytics technology of your choice. ServiceMax, powered by IoT data, makes proactive maintenance a reality today. We take actionable data and automatically create proactive maintenance requests that include recommendations for your technicians. This way, your technicians also leverage machine data to the fullest capacity. By connecting machines to a world-class field service platform, we transform your ability to deliver services that delight your customers.

To learn more about proactive maintenance, click here

ABOUT Dave Miklasevich

As a senior product marketing manager at ServiceMax, Dave Miklasevich is responsible for installed-base, parts management, proactive maintenance, and entitlements of the ServiceMax Execution Management platform. Dave has in-depth experience and knowledge with Big Data, IoT, Cloud, platform security and analytics. Dave has held product marketing and management positions in market leading organizations over the the past 15 years.