Obviously, proper maintenance is critical to machine reliability and avoiding downtime. SiteWatch 360's monitoring capabilities can help plant management schedule maintenance based on real-time loads and running hours, which reflect probable wear-and-tear on specific key machines.
Equipment failure is always expensive, but the question is — exactly how expensive? The final cost is always many times higher than people think, because they focus on immediate issues such as replacement parts and the labor to install them, but that's just the beginning.
When equipment failure occurs, a lot of people (who have perfectly good day-jobs) are suddenly pulled into solving a raft of inter-related problems, such as…
- What went wrong and why?
- What spares do we need? Do we have them in stock?
- If they're not in stock, where do we get them from and when can we get them? Do we have to fly them in?
- Who's going to install them? Do we need an outside expert?
Multiple levels of management and operational meetings can be required concerning…
- Lost production and unhappy customers
- Overtime required to catch up
- Subcontractors, consultants and engineers needed to investigate, repair, and get everything back up-and-running
These are just the short-term costs, but there are medium- and long-term costs too, especially in terms of wasted management time. Any significant failure is likely to produce…
- Wasted output from erratic production
- Lost orders and cancelled contracts
- Fixed costs that occur whether you are producing or not
- Unnecessary costs from making up for lost production, often with inferior machines
- Additional costs incurred in getting the operation back in production
Our SiteWatch 360 real-time monitoring and machine failure warning system is a valuable, yet inexpensive, tool for helping manufacturers understand…
- How their equipment actually operates (as opposed to how everyone thinks it does)
- Whether it's operating the same way it did a month ago or 6 months ago
- If not, what has changed, and why