Our customers come from a wide range of industries, but they share many of the same pain points in their facilities. Over the years, we’ve consulted our customers to better understand these pain points and how our technology solutions can help to alleviate them. We found the following 4 issues resonated with the majority:
- Lack of Money
Up against all of the operating costs and competing projects facilities have, funding for maintenance tools and personnel training is often lacking. This rings particularly true during challenging economic times, as any existing funding for maintenance teams can often be cut significantly if not altogether. Allocating funds towards the tools and technology needed for a successful predictive maintenance program is often viewed as spending future earnings to prevent outages that haven’t happened yet. This can make funding a hard sale against competing priorities. - Lack of Expertise
The U.S. has more jobs than job seekers. Research provided by the Department of Labor shows that the U.S. had 7.6 million unfulfilled jobs in 2019 while only 6.5 million people were job hunting at the time. Unfortunately having vacant jobs and having no one to fill them is an issue that heavily impacts the trades. Finding highly skilled maintenance and reliability professionals can prove quite challenging. The pool of skilled laborers has increasingly diminished over the years as society pushes students towards 4-year arts and sciences degrees. However, lack of expertise is an issue that is further caused by companies not investing in training for the employees that they do have. This is where lack of expertise can become intertwined with lack of money. As often as funding is lacking for tools and personnel, its not unusual for funding to be unavailable for the training needed to develop employees’ skills.
- Data isn’t Actionable
Maintenance and reliability teams need professionals with the expertise needed to interpret vibration data. You can collect data on your machines all day, but the data won’t serve you if you do don’t know what to do with it. Not to mention, teams are often pressured to spend less time analyzing data and just get answers to what needs to be done and how to do it as quickly as possible. Additionally, machine data needs to be stored in a centralized location. This keeps all internal stakeholders aligned, prevents unnecessary maintenance from being performed, and ensures your team stays on top of needed maintenance. Collecting and tracking actionable data proves quite challenging without the expertise, tools, and time. - Unreliable Contractors
When a facility hires a contractor to manage its maintenance program, typically the most inexpensive provider wins the bid. However, hiring inexpensive contractors often comes with a cost. Lower costs can be an indication that the contractor is not as skilled as its competitors. When the contractor lacks skills, your facility will experience the pain points associated with a lack of expertise as described above. Additionally, relying on third party service providers means your machinery might not get the maintenance it needs when it needs it. You won’t be the only customer in their book of business, and contractors don’t always show up when they say they will.
As you can see, these issues are not independent of each other. Add all of these challenges together, and you have a recipe for disaster. All of this feedback we’ve collected through the years didn’t fall on deaf ears. After all, we were once in the field just like you. We’ve shared in these frustrations with you. Your maintenance program needs speed, efficiency, affordability, and most importantly quality. We took it upon ourselves to develop the Advisor RDC service program in response, which is a solution to all of these challenges and more. As part of our new service, you collect data on your machines using the condition monitoring tools we provide you. Once you upload your collected data to the Advisor RDC interface, we’ll take it from there by performing the vibration analysis and delivering next steps all within 48 hours. In its simplest form, what does this mean for you? It means expertise you can count on and actionable data delivered to you at an affordable cost. We recognize the challenges you face, and we’re not just biased. Ask any of our in-house experts, and they’ll share personal stories of the facilities they’ve worked in that would have benefited from Advisor RDC.
Investing in your maintenance program (and doing so wisely) is essential to maintaining the health of your operations. Simply put, your machines are too valuable not to. To learn more about the Advisor RDC service program, head over to our website.
