Innovate Magazine - Spring 2008 - (Page 37)

Who’s Driving the Bus? Is it enough to expect your equipment suppliers to drive your maintenance strategy with their standard offerings? Your equipment vendors typically suggest a wide variety of options and agreements, including on-site, scheduled, preventative, on-call, or self-service maintenance. Regardless of the maintenance contract, vendors who are concerned with the quality of their equipment will want their customers to be successful and work closely with them to forge a comprehensive and cooperative maintenance strategy. Operations managers need to self-determine their maintenance requirements, in partnership with suppliers, in light of several critical success factors, including: • Production application schedules, production windows, and SLAs • Labor contracts and schedules, shift coverage, and facility access • Upstream process consistency upper and lower speciﬁcation limits • Supplier maintenance personnel roles and responsibilities • Control over materials: selection, storage, and movement • Metrics and measures of success with regular review, analysis, and improvement planning Quality equipment will get recognition, but quality maintenance earns its reputation of excellence every day on your production ﬂoor. When it comes to getting the most return from your investment, Predictive Maintenance is the stand-out strategy to preemptively take care of any potential problems before they occur. Predictive Maintenance is not performed by a clairvoyant technician, but by understanding each of the elements listed above and developing a proactive strategy to: • Plan prescheduled maintenance during non-peak hours or times that are carefully choreographed with application SLAs, upstream dependencies, and equipment access hours. • Know and track the lifecycle of every part within the equipment and replace it prior to failure. Predictive Maintenance is more that just preventative maintenance because of the actual data that is used to develop the timelines for replacement. • Involve supplier service technicians in your process to partner with your production employees to get the work done on-time with consistency. • Involve purchasing and warehouse managers in directing material acquisition, storage, and movement process improvement. • Meet regularly with supplier service management to review uptime, unscheduled maintenance and error causal factors, production employee training and mentorship requirements. • Use real production data to drive decisions and plans for improvement. Today’s modern production platforms, from pre- and postpaper handling systems, to production printers, to production inserting and ﬁnishing systems, to mail and delivery systems are much more than mechanical devices. They are tightly integrated with upstream and embedded software controls that require their own maintenance agreements and technical specialists. When it comes to integrating software into your comprehensive maintenance strategy, production managers should consider the following: • Software maintenance starts with ﬁrst-level support. The most effective way to ensure seamless ﬁrst-level software support and escalation avoidance is to ensure that supplier hardware maintenance personnel are cross-trained and competent to deliver ﬁrst-contact support. • Contract coverage hours can vary from hardware maintenance contracts. Ensure that you have the coverage to meet your production requirements. • Expect faster response and around-the-clock coverage for more severe issues. Any issue that stops production should be around-the-clock coverage with a commitment to respond and deliver at least a workaround that restores production in near real-time. • More features and newer versions aren’t always better. Software updates often include ﬁxes and enhancements that were designed for other customers that have questionable relevance to your operation. Before you invest the time and effort to regression, test to ensure compatibility with your applications, sit down with your suppliers, and understand the beneﬁts. Incorporate software in your monthly maintenance strategy reviews. Is it enough to expect your equipment suppliers to drive your maintenance strategy with their standard offerings? Back at the airport, just a few minutes after the unwelcome announcement and the group groan that followed, the intercom again breaks across the waiting area: “We have an update to our earlier announcement. Our ground maintenance crew has informed us that the light was for a deferrable item and that it will not affect the safety of our ﬂight and the maintenance will be performed overnight in San Francisco. We will begin boarding in a few moments with our First Class customers, seated in rows…”. One hundred forty-four souls aboard a ‘bus 320 headed home. Predictive Maintenance: it’s a beautiful thing! Brandon Shoaf is Vice President, Service Operations, Kern, Inc. For more information, visit www.kerninc.com. 37 Innovate Spring 08 http://www.kerninc.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Innovate Magazine - Spring 2008

Innovate - Spring 2008 Table of Contents 10 Tips for Successful Open Houses The TransPromo Path Escape the Complexity Putting a Price on Value A Welcome Boost to Hospitality Team Approach Earns Accolades Bound Together New Highs in Image Quality Transforming the Business of Processing Photos Predictive Maintenance Making the Right Choice Diving into Digital Book Production Doing More With Less Distributed Document Creation

Innovate Magazine - Spring 2008

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