Walt Boyes has more than 30 years of experience in sales, sales management, marketing, and product development in the automation industry both for sensors, devices and control systems for industrial and environmental controls, including Executive Committee and Board experience in several companies. Walt currently is serving as Editor-in-Chief of CONTROL and
www.controlglobal.com."Too much data…not enough data...the data isn't relevant…or the crowning, 'Does anybody even look at this report?'"
Ed Michel, reliability manager and Frito-Lay corporate subject matter expert on CMMS (computerized maintenance management systems), began his presentation at this week's meeting for users of Invensys Operations Management's Avantis and Wonderware software reviewing all the reasons that many CMMS implementations fail to reveal opportunities for efficiency gains.
It is easy, he noted, to think that more data is better. But the integrity of the data is really the controlling factor. "Data integrity is foundational for analysis," he said. "At first we just tried to collect as much data as we could. We realized that regardless of the CMMS, there is a human input and process execution that must occur to get meaningful data." Otherwise, what may look like good data really is not.
At Frito-Lay, they started out by taking the "more is better" approach, developing scorecards down to transactional activity by date, by shift, by time and by occurrence. "We transitioned to 'Leading Indicators' and instead of giving maintenance people a scorecard on which they expected to be graded, we gave them a dashboard so they could be in control," Michel said.
Because it is a dashboard, it can grow and change, he noted. "Are we getting the most out of our CMMS based on the data we collect? No, of course not," he said. "But it is a process. As we continue to drive downtime to 4.0%, we will need to rely more on our information systems to identify trends. How do we gauge our efficiency and not just downtime?"