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CONDITION MONITORING
NEXT has an engineering department of
700 employees, largely maintenance technicians. All 700 use eMaint, with about 500 mobile CMMS users and 200 desktop users. Before implementing eMaint, the warehouses were essentially run independently. “A lot of maintenance tasks were done just via spreadsheets and and managed locally,” Winter says. “They weren’t sharing experiences between them.” Additionally, because NEXT’s large
distribution centres are not designed with complete Wi-Fi coverage in mind, the engineering team needed to be able to work both online and offline without a hitch. Fortunately, with eMaint’s mobile CMMS app, Fluke Mobile, connectivity is not a concern. Technicians can work offline from their tablets, and then the mobile CMMS software will save the updates into eMaint once their connection is restored. “We find that the mobile CMMS system is
very stable because it’s cloud-based,” Winter says. “It tends to work quite seamlessly. Our tablets will be going online and offline, and the actual end user who’s got the mobile device in front of them sees very little difference.”
Putting it into Practice
Implementation at the first NEXT site began at a time of unique challenges, as pandemic lockdowns and Brexit were unfolding simultaneously. eMaint employees could not travel to guide the implementation in person. Lead times for spare parts and shipping times both increased. Meanwhile, the UK’s departure from the European Union took effect. “Suddenly, we had to deal with who's
importing the goods and exporting the goods, and who’s paying all of those tax burdens, which we’ve never had to deal with previously,” Winter says. “Using eMaint enabled us to streamline and plan for those supply chain delays.” After overcoming the hurdles facing the first
implementation, the remaining rollouts were seamless. NEXT now uses eMaint across 17 sites. Though the eMaint team could not travel to NEXT sites in person for the initial rollout during COVID lockdowns, they were there - remotely - every step of the way. “It was proper open heart surgery we were
performing at that time,” Winter says of the initial implementation.
reaPing the rewards
NEXT tracks multiple KPIs, such as asset uptime, using eMaint. “With eMaint, we can immediately see where the hot spots are,” Winter says. “We refer to it as our top 10 issues. We can immediately see and divert our attention to the top priorities.” Knowing what is most pressing helps when
it comes to optimising the team’s time. “We log what we've referred to as engineer utilisation,” Winter says. “We can see the swing between reactive and proactive work.” So, in a given week, 25 of an engineer’s
40 working hours should be focused on planned preventive maintenance. “If those 40 hours are made up solely of reactive work, it means we’re not doing any preventive work,” Winter says. “We would then expect to see more downtime. So, of course it means we have got to invest more time, maybe even lay on overtime, in order to get back on track.” “Using eMaint’s KPI dashboard, we know
what we need to achieve operationally on a day-to-day basis,” Winter says. “When something’s going to go wrong on your car, an orange light will appear on your dashboard. For us, the eMaint system is the orange light on the dashboard. It tells us when something needs to be done.” With all 17 warehouses using eMaint, the
team has clearer insights and perspectives into their work. eMaint lets the engineers not only see the part that they play, but also enables them to see the bigger picture. NEXT has also been able to streamline and
improve their inventory management using eMaint. “We can now hold one spare part across several warehouses, whereas before we were holding one spare part in every warehouse because nobody knew what each actually had,” Winter says. This level of standardisation and centralised
communication has brought benefits in other areas as well. For example, NEXT’s engineers are typically scheduled to work several days on, then several days off. When those technicians come back to work, they do not necessarily know what has happened over the days that they have been off. But by looking at the history in eMaint, they can immediately see what has happened. “eMaint has now become the heartbeat of
the engineering department within the NEXT business,” Winter says. “It is the central focus now, the nucleus of what everybody’s working toward. Whereas previously, everybody was sort of trying to do the right thing, but unfortunately pulling in different directions.”
Fluke Reliability
www.fluke.com
IndustRIal ComplIanCe | august/septembeR 2023 17
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