John Q. Todd

Sr. Business Consultant/Product Researcher

Total Resource Management (TRM), Inc. 

We have all seen it or done it before. Very busy people trying to do their jobs yet having to fuss with a grumpy piece of equipment. Banging and flailing about to bring the expensive tool back to an operational state. Our exceptional people are usually successful. Equipment is back in service for the moment then we all move on to the next task.

Often “downtime,” is looked upon as a big negative and source of cost to the business. But allow us to posit that it’s the time fussing around with cantankerous… aka non-healthy… equipment that is the real source of business inefficiency and staff frustration.

Not being healthy is ok as long as you know it

Take a walk out to the production floor. Catch your breath, pick a piece of equipment then ask yourself:

“Is it healthy?”

While it may be humming away doing its intended function, it may or may not be healthy. How do you know? What does “health,” mean in your context anyway?

Measuring health is looking at a collection of “contributors,” and coming up with a high-level view that may show us what to do next. Very much like blood test results for us humans, we can look at the various indicators, each having a weight, and see where we might have an issue.

Given we can see a tall pole or a driver for the lack of health, now we can make decisions to remedy the situation. As we act, we monitor the situation to see if our efforts are having the impact we wish.

Back to business

Ask your staff to estimate how healthy the equipment under their purview is. They will easily be able to provide you with antidotal evidence of health. But they also may be able to provide you with quantitative insight from collected data that can show you trends and anomalies. Armed with this level of information, you will form a reliable picture of the health of not only the equipment, but also your business.

Translate the time, effort, and costs of non-healthy equipment into the impact to your business. It is possible that there is little impact. In that case you just forge ahead to the next issue at hand. But you may find the health position of a few pieces of equipment are having a significant impact on the efficiency of your business. Now you have something to focus on, make decisions, and monitor for changes to the bottom line.

Even simple things like a temperamental field truck that does not always start when needed can suck up huge amounts of your staffs’ time. Nothing worse than being out in the middle of nowhere after a long day of plying your trade and your only way back into town won’t start… again. I’ve seen it personally. Very tired and dirty construction workers with the hood on the truck up. Sure, the overtime is nice due to the delay, but they really want to get home.

What is MAS Health all about?

Given you are moving to IBM Maximo Application Suite (MAS) and the Manage component, you are in an excellent position to determine the health of your equipment. You have years of maintenance and meter data in the system already.

MAS Health runs on top of MAS Manage, so it is already aware of the Locations and Assets you are responsible for. You can then develop your own approach to determining the health of the groups of equipment by setting up scoring groups. Now, as maintenance and meter data come into Manage, Health will show you the impact and trends over time.

Now you really can point to a piece of equipment and say whether it is healthy or not. No more mystery!

Wrap up

You have the tools in place: Maximo. You have the data and the processes to keep it updated. You now simply need to take advantage of the closely coupled Health component of MAS to give you this view into the equipment/business relationship. Designed with a Reliability Engineer in mind, MAS Health is very easy to configure to suit your definition of health. Contact TRM and let us give you a demo to see how easy and insightful it is.

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Get Healthy in 5 minutes | IBM Maximo & MAS – Feature Friday (YouTube)