In manufacturing, distribution, services, etc. every minute is important with a clear cost and time impact. Here, an automated and agile Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) system is critical. EAM helps you ensure your assets and the underlying system is available whenever required – resulting in high asset utilization, wrench time, better quality and quantity of throughput, at a lower cost.

Why should you aim for 100% availability for your EAM?

Across industries, be it pharmaceutical, retail, manufacturing, oil and gas, utilities, etc., every minute where the asset or service doesn’t perform as expected or isn’t available – becomes a cost with the potential of turning exponential. Moreover, it could affect the market value, or worse, erode customer satisfaction.

So, your assets should perform as desired, at all times and be ready for 100% utilization.

What happens when there’s less than 100% availability? Case Study: Facebook – Oct 2021

We have seen many cases where product outages due to infrastructural issues create mass issues and backlash. On Oct 4th, 2021, Facebook Inc. had the longest outage in its history – lasting over 6 hours. Its services like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp (can also be seen as their assets), weren’t performing as desired. Normally, Facebook Inc. sees more than 2 billion active users every day. Downdetector, a website availability checking portal, showed that the assets had 10.6 million reported problems of accessibility (actual problem instances would be in multiples of this).

On Oct 5th, Santosh Janardhan, the Vice President of Infrastructure, Facebook released a statement suggesting that the base (traffic) networking set-up within their data centers faced configurational issues which had a cascading effect on all their service.

Through these 6+ hours, the net worth of Facebook Co-founder Mark Zuckerberg reduced by $6 billion+. There were some other factors leading to this value erosion, but they were all greatly amplified due to the outage.

How to avoid outages and boost Asset Availability with EAM?

Now, you can say that this is an isolated incident. Yet, it highlights the problem and puts a cost-value on it. You can no longer depend on outdated tech and infrastructure for your EAM.

You may also say that the Facebook case isn’t relevant to your industry, but downtime or outages always have a cascading effect on the bottom and top line.

Consider the case of energy and utilities. The Northeast Blackout of 2003 affected 45 million people across 8 states in the United States. It’s considered one of the worst outages in US history. According to a Department of Energy Report, between 2003 and 2012 there were 679 large power outages amounting to a cost of $18 billion to $70 billion per year.

The worst blackout in global history occurred in India, 2012, affecting more than 700 million people. In 2016, a power outage cost Delta Airlines the sum of $150,000 million. More numbers?

An IDC report from 2015 suggested that Fortune 1000 companies can lose $1 million per hour due to downtime. Another report by HIS from 2016 says that enterprises’ mere incident management cost averages around $60 million per year, collectively amounting to around $700 billion per year (North America).

This CAN happen to your plant. There can be unprecedented situations like the isolated incidents of Facebook, but it also comes down to the inherent agility, manageability, responsiveness, and transparency in your system that you are able to fix and get back to 100% in quick time.

So, how do you do this?

Get the best infrastructure and platform with the most intuitive asset management products (apps) to not just react quicker to asset issues, but also get ahead of the curve and plug probable anomalies before they become a problem.

The best route here is with Crave InfoTech’s EAM solution cMaintenance integrated deeply with the robust and time-tested SAP platforms and infrastructure. And if you want to go a notch higher, the most responsive and agile you can be with asset management is with Crave’s cMaintenance over SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP).

BTP helps you mitigate all your risk of downtime and asset unavailability by structuring multiple secure protocols which keep the services up and live in all scenarios.

Crave InfoTech’s EAM product ‘cMaintenance’ gives you 100% availability

Crave’s industry-benchmarking product cMaintenance gives the plant supervisors and managers complete and real-time visibility across all processes and operations. They can dynamically assign maintenance jobs to the personnel on the shop floor. The engineer or technician will receive the task on their handheld systems (with a ‘design thinking’ perfected SAP Fiori based interface) and would proceed to the location of the equipment or asset.

Crave can even enable intra-plant routing to ensure a seamless workflow that balances processes, real-life movement, and ease-of-use for users. Now, the engineer would get to the physical and functional location of the equipment and task, respectively. They will simply scan the code of the equipment or asset with their RFID gun.

Their live-synced handheld systems would give them the exact details regarding the asset and their task. They simply have to follow a streamlined workflow from start to finish to achieve technical completion. The supervisor or manager can approve and validate the time-stamped completion report in real-time.

This is just a sample and straightforward case which showcases the efficiency and agility of the system. You can reach out to our team to get in-depth know-how of how cMaintenance can help your enterprise.

Circling back to the central point. cMaintenance helps bring your enterprise from reactive maintenance (where you don’t know something has gone wrong until it’s directly disrupting operations) to predictive maintenance.

Preventive maintenance is where the system’s built-in intelligence helps fix possible anomalies before they turn into bottlenecks. This means that you are on track with the timely maintenance of all your assets, be it machines, storage or other facilities, vehicles, etc. Essentially, all your assets are 100% available whenever you need them.

Also, full visibility of the maintenance process helps you align the retirement of depreciated assets and seamless acquisition of new assets to ensure zero downtime.

We can go on and on about having ‘available’ assets on hand, but you already know that. Let’s move to the next point and talk about getting it done.

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