What?
One major reason for downtime is machine crashes or breakdowns. If you notice this happening frequently, particularly on your high-runner machines, it may be time to reconsider your preventative maintenance practices and the structure of your maintenance team.
Time Commitment: Medium
Features Required: Maintenance Module, Downtime labeling (options)
How?
Amper's suite of Maintenance tools can help with this.
Maintenance Plans lets you set which maintenance tasks to be done, how often, and to which assets.- Maintenance Requests allows your team to request maintenance to be done through the app.
- The Maintenance Schedule lets you to schedule maintenance more accurately with usage-based data. Your team can see what maintenance is scheduled to be done when through the app or through the
Maintenance Scoreboard. - Maintenance Tasks will log all maintenance activities in the app.
- Use
Maintenance Analytics to see how much maintenance is being performed and track if we’re doing maintenance activities on time.
You can use Amper's Maintenance tools to service your equipment based on actual utilization instead of time. This approach allows your maintenance team to focus their efforts on high-running machines and avoid wasting time and money on over-servicing.
To address maintenance issues at their root, you can expand on downtime codes in Amper. For example, if "Machine Crash/Breakdown" is a significant code, you can add more sub-reasons within that code to identify the true root cause.
Here are some examples of root causes and potential solution projects you could work on.
| Root Cause | Possible Solution |
|---|---|
Bad Raw Material | Improve QC checks on raw material when it arrives before running it on the machines |
Tool Wear or Break | - Perform tool life studies and set up a system to change out tools before they break - Statistical Process Control. Implement QC checks after X number of pieces to ensure parts aren't going out of tolerance as tools wear. - Change tooling suppliers. Get higher quality tools. Might cost more, but it can potentially be justified with downtime hours lost |
Lack of Preventative Maintenance | - Ensure PM's are getting done. Increase frequency if they are. - Implement usage based maintenance through the Amper App |
No Maintenance Personnel to Come Fix the Machine | - Implement better communication systems to notify maintenance of a machine crash (Implement Andon Call Team through the Amper App) - Hire more maintenance team members - Determine common break down causes. Create break down kits to quickly and autonomously get the machines back up and running |
Mistake in Setup Caused Crash | - Create SOP's for setup and audit setups to ensure each setup is done properly - Modify tooling to standardize setup - Implement first piece inspections |
Mistake in Running the machine | - Create SOP's for running the machine |