Operations and Maintenance (O&M) Management plays a strategic role in shaping business outcomes for companies like yours, belonging to asset-intensive industries such as Manufacturing, Aviation & Oil Refining. Given the huge investments in equipment, you can ill afford a breakdown of core infrastructure, as this can translate into significant reduction in Return On Investment (ROI).
Typically, maintenance costs account for more than 20% of operating expenses, and 4% to 7% of gross revenues. Moreover, the cost of idle time, with regard to hi-tech machines including Numeric Control (NC) and Computer Numeric Control (CNC) machines and robots, can be substantially higher than that associated with other equipment. And, if you are a company with just-in-time (JIT) production systems and low inventories, lengthy downtimes can imply poor performance and service uncertainty, ultimately leading to reduced market share.
With the advent of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), firms can now redefine their O&M practices to boost operating margins. By connecting your operators, engineers, managers as well as physical assets to the Internet, you can create a connected, data-rich enterprise for real-time operational visibility.
The first step here, lies in making industrial assets across the value chain “intelligent”, by embedding machines with advanced sensors that can capture underlying data round-the-clock. This massive volume of information can then be transferred to and stored on the Cloud, and mined through Big Data and Analytics tools for gleaning meaningful insights that can drive informed decision making.
The upshot is a gradual shift from reactive, break-fix maintenance to one underpinned by preventive and predictive processes that rely on monitoring of “smart” devices for effective, remote asset diagnosis. Beyond delivering significant cost efficiencies, such an approach can enable companies to configure entirely new, service-oriented business models, thereby driving greater customer satisfaction and sustained competitive advantage.