Flooring the competition with real time data

HEADNOTE

When Amtico went for a data capture system to straddle operations and maintenance, it opened doors on lean business improvement it couldn't possibly have foreseen. Brian Tinham reports

Maintenance supports

operations, right? At the best companies, that's the case. Maintenance reports into the operations director or equivalent, and there are agreed, relevant KPIs and supervisory systems to provide data to enable that support. In the very best firms, all that is also linked into the production management systems so that operations and maintenance are aware of each other's schedules and requirements, and so is the business.

But for too many manufacturers, that's not the case. For them it's a familiar picture of maintenance versus operations. And that leads to companies, large and small, that consistently fail to live up to their potential - a polite way of saying they waste serious time, money and product in the form of scrap and rework, and are unlikely to be favoured suppliers. In today's globally competitive environment that's not only very bad news, it is unforgivable.