There’s a technological renaissance that is transforming the look, systems, and processes of the modern factory. You might even call it a sea change.
Advanced digital and analytical technologies are reinventing the rules of competition, how work will be performed and what leaders must do to lead. Whether you call it industry 4.0, manufacturing 4.01 or the connected factory, what’s underway heralds remarkable opportunity for industrial manufacturers.
So what does the “back-of-the-house” maintenance function have to do with such big picture, strategic changes? Everything.
As manufacturers work to identify, adopt, and scale enabling technologies – such as smart machines, the Internet of Things, Big Data, plant floor analytics, mobile computers, the cloud, and collaborative robotics – maintenance will of necessity be redefined and transformed.
Leveraging these enabling technologies will allow maintenance to improve efficiency, cost, and performance on the factory floor, which in turn can create a competitive advantage. But beyond that, enabled maintenance can become a new and different revenue stream for the OEM portion of manufacturing. This means that OEMs can utilize data and analytics to sell customers condition-based maintenance, asset optimization, and predictive performance management programs for their equipment, creating a new level of maintenance competitive advantage by adding unique value.
But how do today’s manufacturers get from here to there? How do they use these new data and computing tools to go from reactive maintenance – repairing machines that are broken – to proactive or predictive maintenance – monitoring for future equipment failure and performing maintenance before failure occurs?
It starts with having the vision to build a world-class maintenance strategy.
Download this whitepaper to read the full report.