Like many manufacturers, leading UK tyre producer Dunlop Aircraft Tyres began with a reactive maintenance approach, an unreliable and ineffective way to keep a facility running efficiently. A shortage of onsite engineers only added pressure, increasing the workload for those available.
Maintenance data was also kept in an in-house Microsoft Access database with no scheduling or planning capability, so those tasks had to be managed on paper or in Excel.
This slowed operations significantly and kept the team stuck in the daily firefighting typical of a reactive approach. Plant and controls engineer Michael Thomas knew the maintenance process was unsustainable and wanted to improve production.
Solution
Longevity was a key factor in choosing software. Fiix was a newly acquired software company under the Rockwell Automation brand, and since Dunlop’s plant floor equipment is mostly controlled by Rockwell Automation PLCs, the established trust in the brand made Fiix an easy sell.
In terms of software needs, Dunlop was looking for a system that could view machine history and historical work order data, and their engineers had to be able to log in and access their work from a phone or tablet from anywhere in the facility.
Result
The impact of switching to Fiix CMMS was pretty quick for the team. “We saw improvements within the first few months,” Thomas says. “For example, the use of the CMMS includes producing daily reports for plant managers who previously had to create the reports manually. There has been a tremendous time savings.”
Created daily, the reports generated using the analytics tool are key to tracking things like mean time between failure (MTBF), which is reported on in weekly maintenance meetings.
Other benefits of implementing Fiix CMMS included:
• Better time management: By eliminating paper and Excel, and improving access to machine data, the team wasted less time finding answers and could spend more time solving problems.
• Enhanced decision-making: Access to daily and weekly reports facilitated better decision making.
• Improved data quality: The data was free from human error, aiding in more accurate scheduling and resource allocation.
In addition to the maintenance benefits, Dunlop became the first Rockwell Automation customer outside North America to adopt Fiix CMMS.
The facility plans to keep using technology to streamline maintenance operations, underscoring the important role of digital tools in industrial maintenance management.
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