Core thinking, best practice

Never has it been more vital that manufacturers are free to focus on 'what they do best' – and outsourcing their non-core functions, such as factory equipment maintenance, in order to focus on improving productivity and profitability is one favoured approach. However, it can be hard to get the formula right: one manufacturer's non-core part of the business can be core to another and vice versa. Identifying 'which is which' is often a complex course of action. One company aiming to help them get this balance right is ATS (Advanced Technology Services) – demonstrating how to improve asset management, utilisation and performance by as much as 30%, it claims. How so? "Because the core focus of our business is to 'Make Factories Run Better'," states ATS UK managing director Derek Hill. "Achieving the balance between asset management utilisation and cost control is no easy task. Everybody wants high machine availability, with reduced factory equipment maintenance costs. The problem is that many companies can't make change with their existing factory equipment maintenance practices and staff. There needs to be a serious shift in their culture and approach. That's where we can help." Value to the business Get maintenance best practice deep into the bones of the organisation, he says, and productivity gains will flow from this. "The challenge for maintenance is to quantify its value to the business in a measurable form. Improvements in asset performance, or productivity gains, can have a significant impact on the bottom-line results of the business. "Asset-intensive organisations rely on equipment to achieve their business goals. The equipment is designed to achieve certain levels of output. However, if the assets are not properly maintained, quality and productivity are compromised. Decreased capacity through degradation or failure can significantly impact the ability to meet desired business goals," he cautions. ATS can prevent assets from declining through a managed programme of proactive maintenance, he states, and delivers against an organisation's objectives of profitability, agreed levels of service, safety of its operators and the environment. "By using predictive maintenance and inspection tasks as part of a comprehensive maintenance strategy, the integrity and reliability of the equipment can be extended," Hill points out. "Increase in equipment uptime leads to an increase in revenue. Reducing or preventing the incidents of equipment failure leads to a reduction in spare part inventory levels." Reduce production costs ATS's practice of proactive maintenance can have a dramatic affect on production – especially its quality. But that means shifting from a reactive to a planned, proactive approach for factory maintenance management. Maintenance teams must become proficient at planning maintenance functions and diagnosing when equipment is about to fail, while maintenance management must become far more focused on predicting imminent equipment failure and far less on repairing it quickly after it fails. When maintenance is performing well, costs are reduced and overtime (production and maintenance) goes down, because machines are available and running when needed. Core competency What difference would ATS make, as a partner? "Factory maintenance management is our core competency and increasing results for our customers is a prime objective." says Hill. And how exactly is that delivered? Dedicated and sustained implementation of reliability programs, technology integration, reporting, CI methodologies, preventive maintenance (PM) development and optimisation, spare parts management, and computerised maintenance and management software (CMMS) implementation all figure on his checklist, delivered through both site-based and leverage infrastructure. It's a process that extends the life of capital investments and improves machine availability, while reducing costs, he adds. "Outsourcing the maintenance of your production equipment can improve your overall organisation, because, put simply, process discipline and investment in people can transform underperforming maintenance teams into high performance groups."