When it comes to the production floor of a manufacturing facility, most equipment comes with use and care recommendations. However, your shop, like most, probably doesn’t run within that narrow framework. A routine schedule may not take into account actual use and wear. As a result, maintenance engineers and planners often struggle to accurately plan MRO activities. Preventative Maintenance that uses real-time production data can make that effort easier on everyone. Implementing a preventative maintenance plan using informative and actionable insights will lead to better overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) and a more detailed understanding of performance and production overall. Additionally, sophisticated preventative maintenance tools make it easy to communicate those data points as they relate to the business’s overall performance.

Since the production environment is dynamic, with conditions and plans constantly changing, you look to Epicor Advanced MES to keep things running smoothly. The MES system’s preventive maintenance module orchestrates MRO activity with production, with the common goal of maximizing uptime and minimizing downtime. The same real-time data that fuels the schedule, real-time views, and other core MES elements also feeds precise information about the actual machine, tool, and auxiliary equipment use. The result— reliability and maintenance engineers armed for greater contributions to margins and on-time delivery.

Transform Preventive Maintenance from Routine and Reactive to Proactive and Deliberate

Condition planning can help to minimize costly repairs and extend the life of assets. You make the rules and Advanced MES alerts your team to take action. Advanced MES’s preventive maintenance module lets you define and automatically initiate activities based on runtime, number of cycles, time, or any combination of these criteria. Every rule automatically sends a maintenance activity to the production schedule when the conditions are met, which eliminates needless maintenance activity and conserves precious resources.

Epicor’s Advanced MES coupled with Preventative Maintenance tools can empower manufacturing businesses, as it:

  • Handles MRO activities like cleaning, changing parts, taking measurements, making adjustments, performing inspections, and others
  • Adjusts production schedule automatically for PM/MRO
  • Applies to machines, tools, auxiliary equipment, and other types of assets
  • Accepts tasks, schedules, and requirements from ERP, MRP, and other maintenance systems

Every time a maintenance event flows into the schedule, you can see exactly how it’s going to affect production and you have the ability to make schedule choices and adjustments. Operators and maintenance staff get the information they need in real-time, with alerts and notifications consistent with your MES system configuration. Additionally, each scheduled maintenance activity can include instructions and documents specific to the machine and current requirements, served up where the work is going to take place.

When the maintenance tech or engineer arrives at the repair site, the system lets the worker log in, log out, and document steps and work completed. Your Advanced MES system keeps track of time and captures all of the data that’s critical for future planning and audit.

traceability. Preventive maintenance reports—on past, current, and future activities—help you plan for the right people and the right supplies and parts at the right time without wasting dollars on excess parts, supplies, and hours on the schedule. The preventive maintenance module also helps you create resource utilization reports to examine the cost and time required to maintain any specific machine or tool, any category of machine or tool, or even groups of assets based on shift, customer, crew member, or any other dimension.

Here are just a few capabilities Preventative Maintenance tools from Epicor can provide to manufacturers:

  • Delivers on-the-spot maintenance documents and instructions
  • Provides MRO cost tracking and visibility against assets, work centers, staff, shifts
  • Builds maintenance history with audit trail details— who, what, when, how long
  • Includes pre-defined one-click reports and easy report configuration
  • Allows escalation rules for past due and incomplete activities
  • Allows rules based on runtime, cycles, time, or a combination
  • Generate automatic MRO tasks
  • Provide, real-time alerts and reports

Supercharge Your Preventative Maintenance Deployment with Epicor Data Analytics

The inclusion of Epicor Data Analytics tools as part of your preventative maintenance routine can dramatically improve results. Epicor Data Analytics (EDA) is a cloud-based, easy-to-use solution that can quickly contribute to your business while helping you avoid error-prone approaches such as spreadsheets and manual calculations that often waste time and resources. It also stays up-to-date with the daily stored changes of your production trend monitoring.

EDA provides customizable and interactive dashboards to make it easy to analyze the short-term and long-term data trends related to your production equipment. The dashboards provide visual graphs, charts, and tables, so you can quickly review important information about your production performance and make informed strategic decisions. The EDA grid is where you conduct most of your analysis—and unlike a spreadsheet, you can “drill down” into the data with a simple click to reveal additional details.

EDA is a comprehensive end-to-end service delivered and supported by Epicor. It is fully integrated with Advanced MES using your data to provide a broad understanding of your production performance. As a cloud-based service, EDA minimizes costs for your IT head-count and current system hardware, software, and maintenance budgets. Because you are accessing it in the cloud, you will always have the latest and greatest version of EDA.

With EDA, you have responsive mobile access to your data, so you are never disconnected from your information. “Always connected” means you can respond quickly to the needs of your business and keep your operations highly productive. Use EDA with your maintenance program to help you understand important information like:

  • Mean-time between failures
  • Mean-time to failure
  • Mean-time to repair
  • Maintenance views

About Encompass Solutions

Encompass Solutions is a business and software consulting firm that specializes in ERP systems, EDI, and Managed Services support for Manufacturers. Serving small and medium-sized businesses since 2001, Encompass modernizes operations and automates processes for hundreds of customers across the globe. Whether undertaking full-scale implementation, integration, or renovation of existing systems, Encompass provides a specialized approach to every client’s needs. By identifying customer requirements and addressing them with the right solutions, we ensure our clients are equipped to match the pace of the Industry.


The Epicor® Advanced MES preventive maintenance module is a proactive, deliberate approach to maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO).

 

 

About Encompass Solutions

Encompass Solutions is a business and software consulting firm that specializes in ERP systems, EDI, and Managed Services support for Manufacturers. Serving small and medium-sized businesses since 2001, Encompass modernizes operations and automates processes for hundreds of customers across the globe. Whether undertaking full-scale implementation, integration, or renovation of existing systems, Encompass provides a specialized approach to every client’s needs. By identifying customer requirements and addressing them with the right solutions, we ensure our clients are equipped to match the pace of the Industry.