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Machinery and Equipment MRO
MAINTENANCE, REPAIR AND OPERATIONS
FEBRUARY 2018
Vol. 34, No. 1 Established 1985 www.mromagazine.com www.twitter.com/mromagazine Rehana Begg, Editor 416-510-6851 rbegg@annexbusinessmedia.com Contributors Philip Allen, Philip Chow, Travis Gilmer, Michael Holdsworth, Miguel Lamsaki, L. (Tex) Leugner, Douglas Martin, Max Miller, James ReyesPicknell, Peter Phillips, Brooke Smith, Jeff Smith Jim Petsis, Publisher 416-510-6842 jpetsis@mromagazine.com Jay Armstrong, Sales Manager 416-510-6803 jarmstrong@mromagazine.com Mark Ryan, Art Director Barb Vowles, Account Coordinator 416-510-5103 bvowles@annexbusinessmedia.com Beata Olechnowicz, Circulation Manager 416-442-5600 x3543 bolechnowicz@annexbusinessmedia.com Tim Dimopoulos, Vice-President tdimopoulos@annexbusinessmedia.com Ted Markle, COO tmarkle@annexbusinessmedia.com Mike Fredericks, President & CEO Machinery and Equipment MRO is published by Annex Business Media, 111 Gordon Baker Rd., Suite 400, Toronto ON M2H 3R1; Tel. 416-442-5600, Fax 416-510-5140. Toll-free: 1-800-268-7742 in Canada, 1-800-387-0273 in the USA. Printed in Canada ISSN 0831-8603 (print); ISSN 1923-3698 (digital) PUBLICATION MAIL AGREEMENT #40065710 CIRCULATION email: blao@annexbizmedia.com Tel: 416.442.5600 ext 3552 Fax: 416-510-6875 or 416-442-2191 Mail: 111 Gordon Baker Rd., Suite 400, Toronto ON M2H 3R1 Subscription rates. Canada: 1 year $63.50, 2 years $101 United States: 1 year $108 Elsewhere: 1 year $123.50 Single copies $10 (Canada), $16.50 (U.S.), $21.50 (other). Add applicable taxes to all rates. On occasion, our subscription list is made available to organizations whose products or services may be of interest to our readers. If you would prefer not to receive such information, please contact our circulation department in any of the four ways listed above. Annex Privacy Officer Privacy@annexbusinessmedia.com, 800-668-2374 No part of the editorial content of this publication may be reprinted without the publisher’s written permission © 2018 Annex Publishing & Printing Inc. All rights reserved. Opinions expressed in this magazine are not necessarily those of the editor or the publisher. No liability is assumed for errors or omissions.
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Broaden the field of services
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aintenance and operations teams are intrinsically motivated to strive for agile ways to configure work orders around production demands. They’re always looking for essential tools that improve the relationship between efficiency and profitability. Yet, keeping pace with digital transformation is viewed as a double-edged sword by companies that need to undergo major shifts or don’t have the right tools to coax them along. For laggard companies, change invariably means decoupling from a dogmatic adherence to what worked in the past in favour of leveraging technology. Digitalization is a megatrend that’s enveloping global industrial manufacturing at breakneck speed. Gartner, Inc. forecasts that 20.4 billion connected things will be in use worldwide by 2020 and that total spending on endpoints and services would reach almost $2 trillion in 2017. These numbers are impressive and the technology is being used to powerful effect on two fronts. The first is the opportunity to improve efficiency. Digital transformation is responsible for making smart components smarter. Sensors installed on equipment collect intelligent data, which is communicated to mobile technology, and in turn creates new, unchartered service possibilities across the supply chain. We can surmise improved processes, valuable metrics and KPIs that validate decision-making. The second is the potential for creating new revenue streams, such as selling a product as a service. Letting go of the status quo can seem insurmountable if we have to transform the way we learn, make decisions and interact with our operating environment. Companies grapple with turning the vast amounts of data into insights, and there is a real fear that too much automation will eliminate jobs usually performed by skilled-trades or blue-collar workers. Sure, there’s comfort in sticking to what we know, but the sheer magnitude in tech advancement is our new reality and it’s changing the fundamentals of the business core. Plants and facilities that are keen on cementing their future can now issue automated notifications and real-time visibility into spare parts inventory, equipment maintenance and repair history, or electrical inspection and compliance activity. By extension, for service technicians there is a growing dependence on mobile and touchscreen functionality for communicating and collaborating with back-office personnel to solve critical issues. The promise of solutions at the fingertips is palpable for those who want to simplify recordkeeping of work performed, or look for ways to expedite the monitoring of parts or materials used during routine maintenance of high-value assets. The consummate case study demonstrating how all of this is realized in practice has been unfolding on the pages of Machinery and Equipment MRO. Over the course of the past 11 issues, contributor Peter Phillips has led us through an entire enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation (“The ERP Challenge,” page 36), all the while homing in on how to establish integrated, effective maintenance, field services and spares management systems. The series, which wraps up in this issue, outlines task dependencies, discusses ways to profit from low-hanging fruit, and looks at the pains and gains involved in managing change associated with service lifecycles of equipment. Phillips would be the first to acknowledge that the journey was an arduous and time-consuming endeavour, but that the payoff has been worthwhile. If you haven’t read the full series or if you’re involved in making ongoing maintenance improvements, download our archived issues at Rehana Begg mromagazine.com.
Editor