Making the Production Asset Lifecycle Smarter – Part 1

Authored by John Clemons, MESA Marketing Committee Chair, based on an interview with Ananth Seshan, MESA Model Sub-Committee Member 

MESA International is developing a new MESA Smart Manufacturing model. It covers a lot of ground and includes chapters on the lifecycles of supply chain, personnel, order to cash, product, production, and production assets.

The fundamental purpose of the new MESA Smart Manufacturing Model is to be prescriptive of what Smart Manufacturing does by providing recommendations on how people can be smart in their manufacturing endeavors.

One of the chapters covers the production asset lifecycle and how to make it smarter. Below are a few ideas that are included on this topic in the new MESA Smart Manufacturing model.

Monitoring Asset Health

It seems that it’s always been difficult to accurately track the health of assets in real time. People have been able to track a few critical parameters, but have been unable to truly track all the parameters required to get a complete picture of the health of the asset; however; thanks to smart manufacturing, it’s now possible to get the data necessary from an asset to really understand its health through the IIo, new sensor technology, and new device and communications technology.

This data can then be contextualized and transformed into information that’s extremely useful in understanding and managing the asset’s health. This information can be made available in real time for immediate decision-making and for historical analyses. All for the purpose of monitoring the complete health of an asset.

Avoiding Unexpected Failures

Unplanned downtimes are always costly. They need to be understood, predicted, and avoided if possible. The first step to avoiding downtime is to understand the symptoms of the failures. To truly understand the symptoms of failures, it takes a lot of data – data that hasn’t always been available, until now.

With the technologies of smart manufacturing, the IIoT, new sensors, and new devices and communications, it’s now possible to get the data necessary from an asset to understand the symptoms of a failure, and to analyze the data to get to the root cause of the failure.

Having the data and contextualizing the data, allows for the opportunity to monitor the symptoms of known failures, perform descriptive and predictive analyses on the symptoms, and then take actions to correct the situation before the asset failure occurs.

Root Causes of Asset Failure

Detecting symptoms of failures is important to detecting potential failures and preventing them from occurring, but to truly understand what’s going on it’s necessary to get beyond the symptoms to the root causes.

Smart Manufacturing, along with the IIoT, finally provides enough data to dig deep into the root causes of the failures. This will lead to understanding new patterns of failures and understanding new patterns of symptoms and the root causes of the symptoms and the failures.

Above are just a few of the highlights in the production asset lifecycle chapter in the new MESA model. The new MESA Smart Manufacturing Model is prescriptive and provides recommendations on how to be smart in manufacturing endeavors, including how to make the production asset lifecycle smarter. 

Stay tuned for more from the new MESA Start Manufacturing Model.

Enhance your exposure by sponsoring the MESA Smart Manufacturing Model.