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Get the most out of EAM at Infor TechEd

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You have a best-in-class enterprise asset management solution. But you may just be scratching the surface of what Infor EAM can do for your maintenance team’s productivity and your organization’s overall bottom line. That’s why Infor Education is offering Infor TechEd. Get the most out of your technology investment and optimize how you handle both strategic and day-to-day maintenance activities.

Infor TechEd is a 2.5-day technical education conference that will be held Tuesday, June 5 through Thursday, June 7, 2018, in Denver, CO. You’ll be able to mingle with like-minded colleagues, hear the latest strategy updates and product announcements, dive into hands-on training, and interact with a broad range of product experts and management team members.

“You get to meet the people at Infor who are not only the thought leaders, but the daily lead practitioners for coding, implementation, and design— it’s fantastic!” Michael Tromp, Application Analyst, Elliot Health System

The event draws a diverse range of individuals in technical roles like system managers, system administrators and engineers, business and system analysts, application architects, and application support managers and specialists. Deep-dive breakout sessions will cover:

  • Infor EAM mobile
  • Configuration and system planning
  • Web services
  • Integration
  • Reporting, and much more.

You can mix and match sessions from the different topics, plus attend keynotes, panel discussions, and a hands-on open lab.

What makes Infor TechEd unique?

  1. This is an intimate conference, with fewer than 100 attendees. The event is kept small to provide plenty of 1:1 opportunities with the product experts along with networking time between sessions for you and your peers.
  2. Sessions are two hours long, providing time to gain in-depth knowledge. With multiple sessions on popular topics and fewer attendees than at large events, you’re very likely to get the spot in the session you want or even listen to it twice. Along with that, we provide an open lab so you can go test out the concepts you have learned. The EAM user advisory board has asked for more training and Infor Education is going to provide it.
  3. Approval to attend may be easier to secure. This is an educational event that will provide you with valuable concepts you can implement right away. It’s in a very easily accessible area, right in the heart of Denver, at the beginning of June when the weather should be just perfect.

To learn more about Infor EAM TechEd, read the brochure. You can register here.

 


Infor EAM snags Plant Engineering Product of the Year honors for the third straight year

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Infor EAM’s Kevin Price (in one of his many bow ties) and Mike Stone accepted Plant Engineering’s Product of the Year Gold Award for Asset Management at an awards dinner in Chicago on April 16, 2018.

Plant Engineering announced this week that Infor EAM had won Product of the Year honors for the third year in a row. Specifically, Infor EAM’s version 11.3 won the Gold Award in the Enterprise Asset Management category. Subscribers to the industry publication voted over a period of months to determine which products would make it to the finals, and winners were placed Gold, Silver, or Bronze at a dinner on April 16.

“We are excited to win a Plant Engineering ‘Product of the Year’ award for the third year in a row, because they validate what our customers have been telling us for years: that Infor EAM is one of the best EAM solutions in the market,” said Kevin Price, Infor EAM technical evangelist and strategist. “And there’s more to come.”

Infor EAM was previously recognized in Gartner’s 2017 Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Asset Management. Infor was positioned highest in ability to execute of all 11 enterprise asset management vendors evaluated.

Read more about the EAM 11.3 features that were the basis of its golden win.

 

 

Are we really getting to the root of the matter?

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By Kevin Price

When we discuss getting to the root cause of an issue, we may focus on that one, singular reason an issue arose. This is an all-too-common practice we use for asset failure or incidents, because, let’s face it, it’s easier to point to a single human or procedural error and then simply move on.

But that’s not enough. Enterprise asset management is becoming increasingly complex – and crucial. Focusing on a single cause limits the scope of solutions, and by imposing those limits we risk repeating issues. It is also in the best interests of our organization and its long-term sustainability to access an array of solutions to determine best practices and to create standardized documentation.

Using root cause analysis (RCA) to improve asset management

It’s all about continuous improvement. To effectively move forward, we need to look at cause analysis like a multi-strand root structure, itself. That means if we want to truly uncover what leads to an issue, we need to keep in mind the complexity of each asset and visualize what we are trying to accomplish, both short-term and into the future.

To get alignment around root cause solutions, the best place to start is the end: goals. Then, we can employ what we call cause mapping, a visual representation of causes that may feed an incident.

A cause map is a simple diagram showing how and why a particular issue occurred. It begins by asking the obvious, “Why?” and then asking it at least five times.  It then expands into as much detail as necessary to more thoroughly explain even the most sophisticated challenges.

With a cause map, we have a visual to show how all of the many pieces of an issue interconnect. It makes it easier to communicate what’s known and, most importantly, what’s not. What appears is the root cause as a system of causes, offering many and varied options for mitigating risk and proactively addressing issues before they happen.

In short, root cause analysis needs to move beyond a reactive, putting-out-fires mentality.

An easy way to learn more about RCA

In our upcoming webinar on May 17, co-hosted by Infor and GenesisSolutions, we’ll go more in depth to describe the process of identifying root causes, whether those are incorrect proactive tasks, inaccurate proactive task frequencies, improper task execution, or a combination.

We have found that the better an organization gets in explaining its issues, and what led to them, the better it also gets at finding smarter solutions.

 

Big industrial equipment can deliver big cost savings through cloud-based EAM

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The specialized material handling equipment required for modern industrial manufacturing can quickly become a headache for maintenance managers concerned about operational efficiency, preventive maintenance, and costly failures that can harm business relationships and financial bottom lines.

But with the right enterprise asset management (EAM) strategy, the risk can translate into a major opportunity to cut costs, streamline maintenance operations, and reduce mean time between failures, said Infor EAM Technical Evangelist and Strategist Kevin Price in a recent article for Plant Engineering magazine.

“It’s astonishing—and exciting—to realize how quickly the maintenance and asset management scene is changing,” he said, as a cloud-based EAM system becomes “an essential tool in a modern equipment maintenance manager’s toolbox.”

Paper-based records and visual inspections

Almost in the blink of an eye, the state of the art in maintaining complex, expensive material handling equipment has been completely transformed.

“Until not too long ago, the best a company could do to prepare for a major failure was to make sure technicians knew what to do, keep their supply chains functioning well enough to minimize costly delays due to shortages of parts and material, and take advantage of quiet periods (December holidays, or the summer construction holiday in some regions) to schedule routine but often undifferentiated maintenance and try to spot failures before they occurred,” Price recalled.

Companies relied on paper-based records to track the operating history of their equipment, and preventive maintenance usually consisted of a visual inspection. “If checklists were available in electronic form, there was a time when they were almost certainly stored on local hard drives, and they may well have varied from one department or device category to the next.”

He also noted that, even if checklists were digitized and standardized, they were rarely if ever integrated with the rest of a company’s operations through their ERP or EAM system.

Sensors, cloud, and mobile

All of those gaps and inconsistencies have been corrected in just a few years, making it much easier for maintenance professionals to anticipate costly, time-consuming failures before they occur.

“Today’s modern EAM solutions allow better coordination of preventive and predictive maintenance, using sophisticated sensors and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) technology to spot subtle changes in performance before they’re obvious by physical inspection,” Price said. “The most successful, forward-looking manufacturing businesses are moving their IT operations to the cloud, an option that boosts cybersecurity, reduces IT costs, assures timely, trouble-free software upgrades, minimizes or eliminates costly, time-consuming modifications, and frees up in-house IT staff for more targeted, mission-critical projects.”

And the very best EAM solutions optimize technicians’ time in the field by integrating seamlessly with mobile and tablet devices.

To learn more about the transition to cloud-based EAM, read Kevin Price’s article in Plant Engineering magazine.

 

5 questions that determine whether your EAM system is up to the job

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With any new software acquisition, the devil is always in the details.

But when a software package performs as many mission-critical functions as your enterprise asset management (EAM) system, there are multiple “devils” to be concerned about. With the performance and efficiency of your business in the balance, it’s essential to address every need and make every decision with care.

That discussion begins with the fundamental question of whether your existing EAM is good enough for what you need it to do.

“With the right enterprise asset management system in place, you can not only keep your assets operating within specifications and reduce energy usage but vastly increase efficiency and identify problems before they shut down your operations,” according to a new executive brief on choosing the right EAM system. “In short, you can use your EAM system to optimize maintenance and turn it into a competitive advantage.”

To meet those goals, organizations are encouraged to “consider software that has built-in preventive features and alerts; provides checklists and easy-to-use daily scheduling capabilities; gives contractors access to the system through their own portal; can scale as you add users without causing a system crash; and gives you native, platform-agnostic mobile capabilities.”

The Essential Services Menu

For a sense of how important a well-functioning EAM system is to a competitive enterprise, look no farther than the list of best-in-class capabilities that should be a part of any strategic asset management system:

  • Reliability-centered maintenance, to help you track equipment risk, automate reliability calculations, and identify reliability trends based on equipment histories
  • Energy optimization consistent with key green building standards
  • Checklist functionality that takes complex tasks and breaks them down into coherent steps, easily and seamlessly
  • Effective work and workforce scheduling
  • A secure portal to manage and interact with external contractors
  • State-of-the-art facilities management tools to cut costs, reduce downtime, and manage risk

Is ‘Good Enough’ Good Enough?

Most companies are already running some form of EAM software. And once that software is in place, there’s an overwhelming temptation to dodge the cost and hassle of replacing it by deciding that what you have is good enough.

But is it?

Best-in-class asset management goes beyond work orders to help your operation move along the maintenance maturity model, becoming predictive instead of reactive. You might be tempted to trust the maintenance of assets to your current system, because ‘it’s not broke.’ But there’s a big difference between ‘not broke’ and ‘at the top of the efficiency game.’

Here are five questions to help you decide whether it’s time to consider a change:

  1. Does your current provider offer best-in-class EAM capabilities?
  2. Is their EAM software available in the cloud? Through what platform?
  3. Do they offer a strong mobile version or support mobile usage?
  4. Can their EAM software scale with your business, and is it flexible enough to meet your changing needs?
  5. Is their EAM software supported through ongoing investments in development and support?

Read the executive brief for a snapshot of the more strategic solution your EAM software could be.

 

Standing at the intersection of cloud, IoT, and public transit maintenance

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By Kevin Price

I recently wrote an article for MeriTalk where I discussed how crucial it is for those in charge of our public transportation to (pardon the pun) get on board with applying technology to its most significant challenges.

Specifically, I illustrated how our current, manual infrastructure maintenance practices are not only outdated but dangerous. I listed some very public catastrophes, such as the 2009 Washington DC rail incident, as examples.

The good news, however, is that we have at our fingertips access to IoT, the cloud, and the analytical tools we need to move ahead, and even revolutionize, infrastructure maintenance.  Of course, we all know that when it comes to transportation infrastructure and maintenance, it’s about the allocation of limited resources. So the challenge for us is to make the business case to put precious dollars to the best use.

A digital revolution for public transit

Over the years, public transportation has ballooned into a $61 billion industry which employs nearly half a million workers, making it that much more imperative that the systems are efficient, reliable and, most importantly, safe. Let’s add to that ISO 55000, an international compliance standard that advises on how to best manage physical assets, which can range from things like subway cars to wheel safety sensors, or even structural properties such as bridges and tunnels.

We can also look to the Moving Ahead for Progress in the 21st Century Act, or MAP-21, a bill passed by Congress in 2012 that acts as a funding agent for infrastructure and stipulates the necessary level of compliance with “State of Good Repair” guidelines. This all adds to the complexity of modernizing asset management, and the necessity of doing it now.

It’s no secret we are in the midst of a digital revolution. All of us are more connected than ever before. The rapid advancement of technology, mobile and social networking and our ability to connect directly to the services we want and need are changing perceptions and expectations of the traveling public. Downtime doesn’t exist in this world.

There’s no reason we shouldn’t expect the same from our transit systems. The systems themselves may be outdated, but that doesn’t mean how they are managed needs to follow suit.  Instead, with solutions like Infor EAM for Transit Management, we can bring together the power of the Internet, cloud and industry-specific software to manage asset maintenance in a predictive, not reactive, way. Our quality of life depends on it.

 

Video: Transforming Maintenance and Asset Management

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It’s the best 90 seconds you’re likely to spend this week.

This short Infor video examines the challenges faced by maintenance professionals and reviews the essential characteristics that an enterprise asset management system must offer to help organizations become more proactive.

The need for proper maintenance management is driven by rising costs, frequent equipment downtime, strict compliance regulations, and efficiency gaps that go straight to a company’s bottom line. The EAM modules available from most ERP providers lack industry-specific features and configurability, while a basic Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) won’t be able to scale as your business grows.

The right EAM software should be able to:

  • Schedule maintenance based on criticality, priority, and risk
  • Optimize maintenance based on a thorough condition assessment
  • Record, maintain, and standardize asset information and alerts
  • Search for maintenance data and create work orders based on that data
  • Provide case management and non-conformity tracking, to deliver insights on assets that will soon require repair or replacement
  • Ensure phased record transfer, to ensure a proper audit trail that supports regulatory compliance

“Like everything else in the world, the future of maintenance is digital. So if you haven’t digitized your maintenance operations, you’re already falling behind,” the video warns. “Infor EAM can help future-proof maintenance for your organization, streamline your operations, and maximize your cost savings.”

View the 90-second video.

IoT, mobile, and machine learning: A new era of facility condition assessment for capital planning

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Successful capital projects begin long before you might think. Every project should include a comprehensive facility condition assessment as a critical part of its planning and successful execution.

A facility condition assessment is multi-disciplinary and includes a full review of everything from capital assets to the systems that run the facility. The goal is to determine asset deterioration, failure, and root causes. It’s also a way to prioritize which assets are most important to its smooth and efficient operation.

Facility condition management has been around for a long time. But how it should be done today has not. Like every aspect of EAM, it is rapidly evolving at the speed of technology.  We now have access to the Internet of Things (IoT), sensor technology (which is trending down in price), machine learning to optimize stored data, and, of course, mobile devices.

That can provide us with a lot of information, sometimes even too much. So when facilities begin their capital plans, it is important to hone in on only those assets that, if malfunctioning, would have a significant impact. That starts with a question: What is the value of this asset functioning safely? And it should be asked by all stakeholders in the planning process, including engineers, operations, systems administrator, health and safety, and maybe even architects.

Getting started with facility condition assessment

A recent article in Facilities Management Journal suggested a walk-through approach to assessment. Using mathematical modeling to support the priority assets and make intelligent decisions is key to securing capital project funds.

The closer you can get to the inspection in capturing data, the better. Mobile technologies, specifically tablets, are the most accurate way to capture assessment data. This also makes it easier to apply EAM-specific analytics. For those who may be challenged to justify tablet purchases, know that they facilitate real-time data capture, which can provide unprecedented information on asset age, planned replacement times and replacement costs, including removal and startup. Tablets can also pay for themselves with the time that will be saved per field technician by eliminating the need to enter data later, back at the office.

In a recent IFMA podcast, 30-year EAM veteran Mike Stone discusses facility condition management in more detail. He uses several examples, including the advent of “smart cities” that rely on sensor technology to manage and monitor their assets and infrastructure to show how EAM automation – and innovation – is upon us, now. The key is putting in place the smart strategies and tools to ensure we optimize all the possibilities ahead of us.

 


Predictive maintenance adds years to equipment life, and life to those years

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With the rise of digital systems and Internet of Things (IoT) technologies, predictive maintenance has become not only practical but critical as a way to optimize operations and reduce costs.

It’s hard to think of a better time to be responsible for asset management in any commercial or industrial organization—because it turns out that the steps you take to run your devices and equipment more efficiently also optimize your initial investment, by keeping those units running for longer than they otherwise would have.

For the first time ever, according to a new article in Industrial Maintenance & Plant Operations magazine, you can have it all: You can simultaneously add years to the life of assets that are expensive and time-consuming to replace, while at the same time adding life to their years.

Saving $50 Billion Per Year

The stakes are high. Until recently, plant managers walked a constant tightrope, never quite knowing for sure when a particular device would fail. They could replace parts while they were still working, then second-guess what might have been a needless expense. Or wait for a failure and second-guess the downtime, the potential safety hazard, and the risk to the equipment itself.

Across the U.S. economy, those costs are still monumental: according to supply chain consultants at Deloitte, unplanned downtime cost industrial manufacturers $50 billion last year and reduced productive capacity by five to 20%.

The availability of smart, connected technologies has finally made predictive maintenance available to smaller and mid-sized companies. But gathering more and better insights is just the first step in the process. There’s no point collecting data without a clear picture of why it matters and what you plan to do with it.

How to Predict the Future

With real-time data and the right analytic capability, businesses can cut maintenance planning time by 20 to 50%, boost equipment up time by 10 to 20%, and reduce maintenance costs by up to 10%. And there are secondary benefits that any manager should want to take advantage of.

“A defective device might just stop working, but an essential piece of equipment operating below its optimal performance can turn out a substandard product and undercut a company’s brand reputation,” the article notes. “A smart predictive maintenance strategy reduces downtime, maximizes quality, and helps a manufacturer differentiate itself in a competitive marketplace.”

Also essential are the internal changes in established business processes that help companies take full advantage of the EAM software they acquire.

“Without the foundational building blocks of process and people in place, investment in technology is not likely to yield the desired results,” a Deloitte study quoted in the article noted. “All of the sensors and smart devices in the world are useless unless maintainers know what the values they are reporting mean.”

 

Enterprise asset management: Where workplace safety and higher profits go hand in hand

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There are a couple of important reasons for a strategic approach to enterprise asset management: It’s an opportunity to increase your profits and productivity while literally saving lives and limbs.

The human and economic costs of unsafe equipment and machinery are staggering. Workplace incidents across all industries and sectors killed 5,190 American employees in 2016, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and resulted in nearly 2.9 million non-fatal injuries. That’s 14.2 on-the-job deaths per day, and 5.5 injuries per minute.

And the cost to companies and the wider economy is massive: $250 billion per year as long ago as 2007, including nearly $1 billion per week that employers pay in worker compensation costs, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) reports.

Better Safety Boosts the Bottom Line

The numbers shine a light on health and safety as an area where an ounce of prevention is worth a pound or a ton of cure.

“Apart from the lasting human impact and anguish of a workplace accident, properly-maintained equipment and well-honed, well-understood safety procedures support a company’s bottom line,” writes Infor’s Mike Stone in Industrial Maintenance & Plant Operations. “A safer workplace is one of the essential ingredients that ensure consistent, reliable, uninterrupted operations, building and sustaining a company’s social license to operate and keeping workplace relationships smoother and more collaborative.”

“Injuries and illnesses increase workers’ compensation and retraining costs, absenteeism, and faulty product,” OSHA agrees. “They also decrease productivity, morale, and profits.” The agency cites a Fortune Five company where a strong safety program improved productivity by 13%, along with a smaller, 50-person operation that decreased faulty product and saved more than $265,000.

Getting from Here to There

An end-to-end approach to workplace safety begins with keeping equipment in optimum, safe working order, developing proper workplace procedures and rigorous training plans, and deploying sensors that set off alarms or simply shut the equipment down when it’s being misused. A comprehensive, cloud-based EAM system does so much more than legacy equipment history spreadsheets, keeping critical assets in top working condition rather than failing or becoming a safety risk.

The right EAM software will:

  • Lay out preventive and predictive maintenance schedules based on manufacturers’ specifications and actual equipment histories;
  • Deploy Internet of Things technology to spot inefficiencies or emerging hazards before they’re visible to human eyes;
  • Replace hard copy maintenance routines with mobile checklists that make better use of technicians’ time, while automatically uploading service records to a central server;
  • Replace multiple volumes and editions of hard copy manuals with electronic formats that are easier to use, and readily accessible to maintenance staff working in remote locations;
  • Give senior management immediate visibility on maintenance costs and performance—and on the implications for operational safety.

“Unless your business line happens to have something to do with health and safety, you may not have too many opportunities to literally save lives while boosting your own bottom line,” Stone notes. “Enterprise asset management helps you connect those dots at the most visceral level.”

Read “Boosting your bottom line with a safer workplace” in Industrial Maintenance & Plant Operations.

 

Is it our way or the highway? Lessons from the DOT

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In 2016, the American Public Transit Association cited data showing that 40 percent of the country’s buses and 25 percent of rail transit assets are in marginal or poor condition. That’s not only costly but risky and dangerous.

Public transit would be wise to follow the lead of those agencies that run our nation’s highways. State DOTs and the federal entities running the roads are at least a decade ahead of the public transit community in implementing sophisticated enterprise asset management (EAM).

A recent article in American Infrastructure outlines the urgency of having an advanced EAM system for our nation’s transit systems. Strategic management is important both for aging fleets and new transit investments. Recognizing the financial shortfalls that plague all public systems, it’s critical to lay out a plan for why and how to optimize system management using smart technology that supports the State of Good Repair (SGR) rule of 2009.

The time is right to make this a priority. Changing environmental standards make management more complex. Evolving customer expectations and competition for users (think ride-sharing apps) mean hard data on ridership satisfaction is needed. That’s all in addition to ongoing concerns about safety and downtime.

Getting from reactive to preventive maintenance

The key is establishing comprehensive, centralized EAM that offers predictive and prioritized data on all aspects of maintenance repair and replacement. In the face of funding challenges, which are never going away, the right system creates efficiencies, reduces the risk of shutdowns, and cultivates a culture of continuous improvement and innovation. It also boosts safety and compliance.

According to surveys and interviews conducted by Infor, a reactive, or run-to-failure, management plan wastes 30+ percent of resources. A more reactive strategy, enabled by the right technology that puts maintenance at the center of the whole system, results in a less-than-5 percent loss of resources.

So what is the right EAM system? It is:

  • Long-term. Not tactical
  • Weighs operations, maintenance, reinvestment system expansion and creates a single source of data
  • Has cross-functional capabilities—providing views from planning, engineering, funding and IT
  • Encompasses quality, trusted data for precise decision making

Organizations using EAM have reported seeing 20 percent improvement in labor productivity, 10 percent improvement in fleet availability, 50 percent improvement in warranty cost recovery, and 30 percent reduction in inventory levels. One US bus company reports recovering $1 million in warranties every year since implementing Infor Enterprise Asset Management, which is built specifically for the transit industry and available in the cloud.

In 2015, US transit users took 10.6 billion trips on various transit modes, according to the American Public Transit Association. The right EAM gives us peace of mind that those trips are not only smooth and safe but also efficient and cost-effective.

 

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