Operating manufacturing plants at full capacity requires coordinated decision-making across the different functions in the plant, chief among which are maintenance and production. This requires a single-source-of-truth for decision-making – centralized data collection and analytics to support production as well as maintenance decisions. This includes analyzing machine data to support production decisions such as improving utilization, and maintenance decisions such as scheduling planned repairs based on actual machine usage. This also includes giving production personnel access to tools they can use in requesting help from maintenance personnel, and giving maintenance personnel tools that they can use in understanding the production context at the machines.
However, most manufacturers struggle to integrate these functions, and maintenance and production remain siloed, with completely separate tools for data collection and decision making. This results in plants functioning sub-optimally, with poor internal coordination and collaboration.
VIMANA solves this problem with the VIMANA Elevate offering, which collects and analyzes shop floor data and provides it to shop floor users – including operators, maintenance personnel, and engineers – serving as the single-source-of-truth for all decision making. VIMANA Elevate enables integrated decision-making across maintenance and production, by making production data available in maintenance systems, and by enabling operators to communicate directly with maintenance personnel to address equipment failures and downtimes.
VIMANA Elevate’s open APIs allow for flexible and simple integration with Asset Management systems such as IBM Maximo. Operators can create tickets in VIMANA Elevate, and this information can automatically trigger work orders in IBM Maximo that can drive actions by maintenance personnel. This allows users to use the tools that they are most familiar with – operators prefer VIMANA Elevate since its the tool of choice for the shopfloor, while maintenance personnel can continue to use the specialized capabilities of Asset Management systems such as IBM Maximo.
VIMANA Elevate’s open APIs also enable systems such as IBM Maximo to directly access data pertaining to machine run times and component usage that can then be used to trigger use-based maintenance, as opposed to scheduled or plan-based maintenance. This can ensure that maintenance operations are performed at the right frequency. Maintenance systems can also look at historical machine utilization patterns served by VIMANA Elevate’s APIs to schedule maintenance at optimal times when production can be least disrupted.
VIMANA Elevate is proven technology to integrate production and maintenance functions at manufacturing facilities. The integration facilitated by VIMANA Elevate allows manufacturing plants to radically simplify their maintenance operations through increased communication and collaboration with production personnel, while maximizing the investment they have made in existing asset and maintenance management systems.
