Bringing Preventative Maintenance from Excel to a Modern Application
By logging into the computers that are available in the maintenance shop, the operators can now enter the tracked data directly into simple forms within the application.
Challenge
A client in the food and beverage industry located in Vermont has been using paper to track previous and future maintenance operations. Every week, the maintenance operators would write down the maintenance operation that needed to be performed for each piece of equipment on a large piece of paper. This paper was then displayed in the maintenance shop.
The information that was being tracked included:
- Line
- Equipment
- Component information (part#, image, vendor, )
- Week Number
- Downtime duration
- Work Order information
- Maintenance type (planned, unplanned, breakdown)
- Root Cause
Once a week the maintenance manager had to go through the multiple pages and write down the data into an Excel spreadsheet. This old-school way of doing things was creating several problems:
- Human errors, when typing the data into Excel
- Excel crashes, due to the volume of data
- No backup
- Data wasn’t saved in a secured location
Solution
Hallam-ICS created a user-friendly and interactive application. A web application using ASP. Net and a Microsoft SQL Database was developed to mimic the existing Excel spreadsheet. This enabled the user to have an interactive application that they would be comfortable using.
By logging into the computers that are available in the maintenance shop, the operators can now enter the tracked data directly into simple forms within the application. This new application saves the manager about two hours a week and reduces the number of human errors. The data is now saved into a secured database and backed up daily. The solution devel- oped by Hallam-ICS also includes interactive reports to analyze previous operations and help answer the following questions:
- What is the downtime duration by week?
- What is the downtime duration by root cause?
- How many breakdownns occurred last month?
- Which production line has the highest number of downtime events?
In addition, a new report displays the next planned maintenance operations by line and equipment.
Results
Our team accomplished the following:
- Streamlined Maintenance Tracking: Replaced a manual paper-based system with a user-friendly web application using ASP.Net and Microsoft SQL, enabling maintenance operators to enter data directly and eliminating transcription errors.
- Enhanced Efficiency and Reporting: Saved the maintenance manager two hours per week while introducing interactive reports to analyze downtime, root causes, and maintenance trends by line and equipment.
- Improved Data Security and Reliability: Ensured all maintenance data is stored securely, backed up daily, and protected against system crashes, providing a reliable and sustainable solution.