How do you use technology to ensure a machine stays in tip-top condition?
Do you use one system to secure your plant from theft, one to monitor its use, one to note down its maintenance needs, another to monitor fuel burn and then put together a report on a separate system to present to management?
This approach delivers a minefield of systems that don’t talk to each other, are monitored by different people, can’t provide the right information in the right format and ultimately create more work and confusion than intended. Everyone recognises that information is very powerful but if it is not used properly it just overloads. Technology is also not yet at the stage where it can replace human intervention and skills.
One core area where technology can be brought together with human expertise in an integrated a positive way is condition monitoring. By packaging the technology and systems together with human expertise you can start to influence the use of that technology to drive it in the right areas, in order to achieve the higher availability, higher utilisation and lower running costs.
Pilot project
A good example of this is a recent pilot project Finning ran in the central west region, which combined our equipment manager system, fluid analysis and TA1 and TA2 type inspections. All the information from these systems had been out there but underutilised and very fragmented.
We found out very early on in our research that certain areas of the business use the information better than others. People we spoke to said they wanted to use the information, but with their pressures and other job roles, no one was able to look at the information all the time.
It was this consultation process that showed the need to develop a complete condition monitoring solution that takes all the fragmented information and brings it into one application and importantly one department. In doing this a team were able to dissect the information, compare and contrast it against all the other information from individual units and pull it together around a specific machine. The team, including former engineers were then able to make a recommendation that could assist a customer in the best way possible.
Dashboard
From a practical level we have now developed a condition monitoring dashboard, which is a bespoke piece of software that was specified and designed in-house by our IT department. The software takes all the fragmented information, like fuel burn, component life, machine operation and location, pulling it into one place so that it can be easily reviewed by the condition monitoring team. They in turn, can make timely suggestions to customers and provide them with the information that is of use to take operational and performance decisions.
This then rolls into the final phase of how the industry should be using technology, which is on a more practical level with programmes like eco-drive showing the people that matter like operators and their managers just how they can make performance improvements.
This training designed for operators, site supervisors and managers involves both classroom and practical demonstrations, taking an individual or groups and showing them best practice techniques in a live environment. Here technology mounted onto machines gives live data to our team showing the impact of the operators actions and right foot, showing them how fuel burn is a significant indicator to component life.
If they can start to look, use and understand different behaviours and the management understands them too, lower fuel consumptions and lengthened component life can be achieved.
The industry needs to look at the way is uses technology, accesses elements like condition monitoring and operator training and ask itself serious questions about releasing its value.
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