Culture Change | “Maintenance Doesn’t Believe What Operators Are Saying”

Building IIoT momentum in the factory is getting quite a bit of attention these days, as manufacturers figure out how to future-proof current investments and choose the correct control and data platform. Advances in industrial connectivity are dispelling fears away from awful “rip-and-replace” scenarios and more modest incremental upgrades, such as industrial servers moving equipment data to business analytic platforms are being well understood.

On the other end of the spectrum, unified control and data acquisition platforms are providing “cleaner” solutions, albeit more expensive. A recent Tyson Foods food safety webinar from Rockwell Automation revealed this type of approach and provided details on a recent modernization effort for multiple plants and their control pand data acquisition platforms.

The automation platform solution included a Microsoft-based SQL server, VantagePoint Software and historians for some of its plants. However, Jonathan Riechert, senior engineer of innovation at Tyson Foods adds the visibility into the equipment was something of a new challenge operators and maintenance staff.

“We were trying to show that data is available and they can see how their equipment is operating, says Riechert. As far as operators went, the biggest investment that we saw from the operators perspective was being able to show them some of the tracking that we did with equipment malfunctions, says Riechert.

“So, in essence, we created a maintenance report and one of the complaints from operators is that sometimes maintenance doesn’t always believe what they’re saying. Well, now, we can put on paper that this is how many times the machine specifically faulted for this issue and be able to create buy-in in some ways.”

The disruption is a real issue, but momentum is building for not only technology but also the acceptance of new processes in asset management.

>> Click here to view the webinar, “How You Can Achieve Results in Your Organization.”