Get your Fiix: Maintenance news for October 2019

Check out the articles below for your monthly dose of interesting and informative maintenance news from around the industry.

Maintenance news from around the world

Don’t focus just on asset reliability (David Berger, PlantServices)

In the face of rising global competition, companies are looking for new and innovative ways to grow and become more profitable. One way that production facilities are trying to gain this competitive edge is by spending less and producing more through asset optimization and better management of physical assets. The goal may sound simple, but the path to achieving it is anything but clear. This article looks at how maintenance and operations management can provide a roadmap for achieving asset optimization, and where reliability fits into this equation.

Smart Manufacturing Drives Five Key Changes (Kevin Hill, SME.org)

As manufacturing technology has grown more and more sophisticated in recent years, it’s given rise to the era of smart factories and revolutionized the way businesses think about production. A key characteristic of this technology is that it is connected—every device talks to each other and shares information that can be used to make data-driven decisions. Because of this interconnectivity, maintenance has been impacted greatly by this shift. This article covers what a jump into the world of smart factories might mean for maintenance teams and the way they work.

A New (and Virtual) Reality for Maintenance (Dan Phillips, MachineDesign)

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is poised to transform how people think about maintenance and operations. The prevalence and declining cost of sensors, wireless connectivity, and more intuitive data analysis tools are contributing to this trend. However, the true power of this new wave of technology resides in how it’s used by humans. This piece looks at augmented reality as an example of combining the world of technology with practical, real-life examples to improve precision maintenance and proactive maintenance.

Does your classification system make the cut? (Clarence Kreiser and Jim Miller, Aggregates Manager)

Everyone dreads the message from quality control that product has become out of spec. The line needs to be shut down, production is halted, and equipment needs repairing, all of which can translate to thousands of dollars worth of lost time and business. This post looks at how this nightmare scenario can be prevented by applying better maintenance practices to the equipment involved in screening, separating, and classifying material. It provides tips on keeping parts in top shape so costly stoppages are eliminated and production runs smoothly.

Maintenance news from Fiix

Calculating the cost and ROI of a cloud-based CMMS

One of the most common questions we get here at Fiix is, “How much does a CMMS cost?” The runner up is, “What’s the ROI of CMMS software?” Both are good questions. But they’re also tough ones. That’s because there’s no magic number. There are a bunch of factors that impact how much cloud software costs, and more importantly, how much value you get from your CMMS. This blog is a primer on some of those factors, and while we couldn’t get into absolutely every detail since every facility is unique, it lays the groundwork for finding the cost and value of a CMMS.

7 CMMS features that solve 90% of your maintenance problems

Think of the challenges your maintenance team faces every day—breakdowns, backlog, missing parts, cost overruns—the list goes on. Luckily, CMMS software offers a helping hand in eliminating these headaches. The best part is, you don’t have to learn how to use dozens of tools just to rid yourself of your biggest problems. This article outlines seven CMMS features that target issues at their root and help you solve 90% of the issues you face at your facility.

Four new Fiix features and what’s coming next

Our quarterly innovation webinar took a look at new features available to Fiix users and some exciting releases coming to the software before the end of 2019. The recorded webinar explored new releases, including an enhanced administrator experience, improved work orders on mobile, and our new Integration Hub. The video also highlights some of the features scheduled to be released by the end of the year, which include a new work request portal and stronger mobile asset management capabilities.