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The maintenance department is an incubator for further developments in many companies and drivers for digital transformation. The basic essence of industry 4.0 is the optimisation of the information flows within and outside the company for accelerated adjustment of corporate organisations in the context of increasing competitive pressure. Due to the multitude of interfaces, information and data streams as well as their service characteristic, the maintenance department is ready to take the next step towards industry 4.0 and smart maintenance.
Despite endless publications and advertisements, the promise of smart maintenance is not technology but productivity. To achieve sustainable transformation, use cases need to be transformed into business cases. For that matter, lighthouse projects are not the key to success but transforming your departments, processes, data management, reporting and so on is. Another big misconception of industry 4.0: Transformational change does not happen with sensors or dashboards but with people. Therefore, companies which already invested in their people, culture and in lean six sigma have a head start. Nevertheless, it is no reason to rest. The journey to smart maintenance is long and no company can truly say that they achieved it already. In order to advance in industry 4.0 a digitisation roadmap is the best tool to show the big picture and at the same time link this vague vision to concrete measures. It is the only way to justify investment in infrastructure and guide your people into change.
But the first two questions on your way to smart maintenance are always the hardest:
1. What do I aim to achieve and how can industry 4.0 contribute to my goals?
What measure am I already pursuing to reach that goal and how do they further my aspirations?
Today, maintenance exceeds this definition, it is significantly more.
In many companies, it plays the role of an incubator for development
and drives digital transformation forward. The very essence of
Industrie 4.0 is the optimisation of the flow of information within as
well as outside of a company to accelerate the adjustment of company
organisations in the context of increasing competitive pressure.
Because of the variety of interfaces, information and data that
is available as well as its service character, maintenance lends itself easily as the area of choice for a company to make Industrie 4.0 real. Whilst doing so, the aim is not to equip employees with the
latest “gimmick“ for order processment or to be the company with
the highest number of lighthouse projects. Instead, maintenance
ensures reliable and cost-efficient production and, consequently,
the primary creation of added value of the manufacturing company.
Those who were identified as top performers during the “Smart
Maintenance“ consortium benchmarking by FIR at RWTH Aachen
University gain particular useful ideas twice as often as other follower companies directly from staff, thus releasing the right potential.
Information and data help to reach these goals and transfer the
vision of smart maintenance into actual pratice. But what is smart
maintenance exactly and how far along are you in the development
of your individual smart maintenance concept?