Automotive Parts Manufacturer Saved A Lot With Effective Maintenance Management System

To avoid reactive maintenance and gain visibility into the inventory stocks, the company wanted to implement an effective maintenance management system that can take care of their daily operational needs.

Challenges

The company manufactures auto parts. Manufacturing facilities of the company are spread over a large area. To keep the maintenance operations data of all manufacturing units they were using spreadsheets. There they recorded all the maintenance activities. As a result, visibility and valuable man hours are lost, affecting operations. Also, due to manual errors, inefficient planning of preventive maintenance activities resulted in sudden breakdowns resulting in costly reactive maintenance. Moreover, spare parts information is captured in a separate tab of the same spreadsheets. As a result, there is a lack of visibility within the inventory, leading to overstocking, understocking, loss and theft of equipment spare parts. This resulted in unnecessary overhead costs.

Solutions

There are 8 Manufacturing Units of the company, each with about 30 Equipment, which includes lathes, tool head shapers, grinders, furnaces and others. A breakdown of any one of these equipment can have a direct impact on production. Therefore, the maintenance should be regular. The company was looking for an effective maintenance management system to address this issue. As a result of interviews and discussions, the company realized DreamzCMMS as the best fit for their needs. DreamzCMMS helped them to run preventive maintenance more efficiently. A real-time view of the jobs is accessible to the management. Spare parts inventory management is more efficient. The management can always view the spare parts stock situation real-time. This prevented overstocking, understocking, losses and thefts.

Setting Up For Preventive Maintenance 

Previously, scheduled maintenance activities were managed manually via spreadsheets. This resulted in a lack of visibility when performing maintenance activities. It was also time-consuming since one has to read the entire document to see the schedule of the maintenance of the equipment.

The company is now able to carry out maintenance activities more efficiently with DreamzCMMS. The system helped to onboard all the equipment from all the manufacturing units into the system. Now the senior management could have a centralized view of all the operations. Autogenerated QR Code of each equipment contains information regarding its details along with the maintenance history. The scheduled maintenance is in accordance with the meter readings of the equipment which technicians inspect on regular basis.

Executing Effective Preventive Maintenance

DreamzCMMS allows the technicians to better execute preventive maintenance tasks. Because they get notification real time about the assigned work order to them on mobile apps. To view the relevant meter readings and maintenance history of the equipment as they are performing maintenance activities, they need to scan the QR Code on the equipment. In the event of any problems, they can report problem right away. And maintenance manger generate and assign work orders to them.

DreamzCMMS helps the technicians to view their assigned work orders and carry out the maintenance tasks. Hence the equipment maintenance become regular, which prevents unexpected breakdowns and expensive reactive maintenance without hindering production. Moreover, the management has access to real-time updates of the tasks, which resulted in transparency regarding equipment maintenance.

Effective Inventory Management Saved A Lot

The inventory management system of DreamzCMMS allowed the company a real-time visibility into the spare parts available in the inventories of its manufacturing units. Management will receive a notification of the set reorder levels of the spare parts. It helps them decide when to procure and what to procure so that each manufacturing unit’s inventory levels are adequate. This also enabled the company to avoid situations such as overstocking, understocking, thefts and losses. Hence it resulted in cost savings  to the business. The real-time inventory data allowed the management to transfer spare parts from unit to unit depending on their stock levels. So there is no need of procuring fresh stocks,  which helped the company to save time and money.