Predictive Maintenance & Reliability Centered Maintenance

Maintenance, in all its essence, is an absolutely indispensable activity for all organizations today. Downtimes or any damage due to malfunctioning of an equipment are most expensive and thus an immense squeeze in the profits. Almost each and every organization across industries have woken up to this fact and employ some or the other maintenance system

Furthermore to just having a system in place to take care of the maintenance activities, organizations today are moving towards most intelligent and sophisticated methods of maintenance viz. Predictive Maintenance and Reliability Centered Maintenance.

The goal of Predictive Maintenance is to perform maintenance exactly when the equipment needs it - neither earlier nor later than necessary. This essentially means tracking key indicators over time to predict when the equipment needs repair. Predictive maintenance programs measure equipment on a regular basis, track these measurements over time, and take preventive action whenever the measurements are about to go outside the operating limits. Repairing equipment as-needed requires fewer man-hours and parts than corrective maintenance.
In a similar fashion, Reliability Centered Maintenance focuses on prioritizing maintenance efforts based on equipment's importance to operations, its downtime cost in revenue and customer loss, its cost of repair, and its impact on safety. It offers extensive analytical data to ensure that the critical equipments are identified and maintained on a priority. Reliability maintenance depends on the same measurements used in predictive maintenance, but saves additional maintenance cost by spending less effort on lesser important equipments

The EAM (Enterprise Asset Management) module in the Oracle E-Business Suite family offers these refined maintenance techniques of Predictive Maintenance as well as Reliability Centered Maintenance

But as they say, just implementing something does not ensure a job been done. It is equally important for people working with these methods to understand them thoroughly and learn how to identify potential problem areas. If an intelligent solution is implemented and work practices change accordingly, phenomenal results become apparent pretty soon.

Most challenges in Linear Asset Management

Maintenance of linear assets (A kind of networks) is completely different from maintaining non linear assets like a fleet, machine. They through lot more challenges in modelling and executing the maintenance work compared to non linear assets. The ability to model and execute the maintenance these assets is what can tap the huge market potential in this segment

Assets can be broadly divided into two categories namely Liner and Non linear. If we underrated non linear assets, it is easy to understand linear assets. Non linear assets are like Plant, equipment, Machine, fleet etc., they are confined to a size and specific location etc., Maintenance of them is relatively easy. Linear assets are not specific to single location. Linear assets can be like roads, runways, gas pipe lines, electrical transmissions, rail tracks, telecom lines etc., where they are not specific one single location. They more or less represent a network. Many linear asset networks cross over with other networks and can also be a place holder of many non linear assets. For e:g one railway track can connect to other railway track and also holds many non linear assets like traffic control systems, stations, power generating equipment and more importantly other parallel linear asset like power cables etc., Maintaining these assets requires much more capability than maintaining non linear assets

There are many challenges that will surface in maintaining these assets. All these challenges need to be addresses adequately by any ERP to realize the benefits. Again the challenges will be different for different industries and this blog lists these challenges a generic manner

1. Modelling of the linear assets: As the linear assets are not confined to a single location but widely spread across some geographies, modelling of these assets is the first most challenge for any ERP. This modelling can be either engineering or visual in nature. For e.g. a metro rail network is spread across a city. Typical asset hierarchy may not work here.
2. Assigning the non linear assets to the linear assets: Every linear asset can be a place holder for many non linear assets. For e.g.  a national highway contains traffic signals, light posts at definite locations also requires maintenance.
3. Parallel networks: There are some networks that work in parallel. A metro rail network requires a parallel power lines. Failure of any of them can result in stoppage of the services. Modelling of such networks is a challenge.
4. Intersecting networks: Networks that cross over. Typically can operate independently but the shutting down of one network can result in

Sales Order Process - Simple steps

The order process has 5 main steps.  In these steps, you will enter an order, book the order, pick the order, ship the order, and then close the order.   Since Order Management relies heavily on the workflow technology, I will show you the workflow status for each step along with the order and line status.  Below is a summary of the status for each step:

Step	Order Header Status	Order Line Status	Order Flow Workflow Status (Order Header)	Line Flow Workflow Status (Order Line)
1. Enter an Order	Entered	Entered	Book Order Manual	Enter – Line
2. Book the Order	Booked	Awaiting Shipping	Close Order	Schedule ->Create Supply ->Ship – Line
3. Pick the Order	Booked	Picked	Close Order	Ship – Line
4. Ship the Order	Booked	Shipped	Close Order	Fulfill – Deferred
	Booked	Closed	Close Order	Fulfill ->Invoice Interface ->Close Line -> End
5. Close the Order	Closed	Closed	End	End

Step 1: Entering an Order
Let’s assume that all the master data (customers, items) have been entered and that the basic Order Management configuration is in place.  To enter the order header information, you will need to know :
1.       Your customer’s name or number
2.       Your customer’s bill-to and ship-to addresses
3.       The order type you wish to use
To enter the order line information, you will need to know :
1.       The item number
2.       The quantity
3.       The selling price (either by using a price list or by manually entering the price)
4.       The shipping warehouse
Once the order is entered and saved, there are two workflows that are triggered.  The “Order Flow – Generic” workflow is the workflow associated with the order header and the “Line Flow – Generic” workflow that is associated with the order line.  The header workflow (Order flow – Generic ) will move from the “Enter” node to the “Book – Order Manual” node.  This tells us that the workflow is waiting for us to click the “Book Order” button.  The line workflow (Line Flow – Generic) starts the “Enter – Line” status.
At this point, your order header and order line status will be “entered”

Step 2:  Booking the Order
When you have completed entering all the order lines, you can book the order by clicking the “Book Order” button on the Sales Order form.  This will perform a check on your order and, if everything is ok, it will change the order header status to “Booked” and the order line status to “Awaiting Shipping”.
During the booking process, both workflows (order and line) perform some activities.  The order workflow moves from the “Book – Order Manual” node to the “Close – Order” node.  The “Close – Order” node will wait for the lines to be closed and for the month-end to pass.  The line workflow moves from the “Enter – Line” node through the “Schedule – Line” and “Create Supply – Line” nodes to the “Ship – Line Manual” node.  This updates the sales order line with a scheduled ship date.
After the order is successfully booked, you are ready to perform the pick release

Step 3: Picking the Order
When pick release an order, the shipping module moves the item from a sub-inventory to a staging area. This transaction is called a delivery.  Think of a delivery as the act of driving a forklift to