Setting up Asset Management in Microsoft Dynamics 365 for managing and reporting Asset faults
Author: Kenny Gunter, Senior Consultant, Arbela Technologies
Managing assets in asset-intensive industries can be expensive and time-consuming. By applying best practices and a CMMS (computerized maintenance management system), your business can reduce maintenance expenses and downtime when assets must be fully operational. Practicing scheduled maintenance will also extend your assets' lifetime. However, preventive maintenance is not always enough to highlight these consistent faults due to operator error, using assets under abnormal conditions, fruitless expenses while under warranty, or detecting trends of abnormal behavior.
The case for Fault management
Do you know why your assets fail? Do you know what remedies we applied to fix the faults? Do you have good data and reporting to see trends in asset behavior? Do you have the tools available for your Reliability engineers to use so that you can maximize your asset uptime and minimize cost due to downtime?
Asset Management for Microsoft Dynamics 365 allows for a structured setup of user-definable data to ensure accurate reporting on common faults encountered on your assets.
Faults can be set up in a hierarchical fashion to capture and report on:
- Fault symptoms
- Fault areas
- Fault types
- Fault causes
- Fault remedies
Using the Fault designer, you can configure fault combinations that are applicable to specific asset types to ensure data integrity. Doing so will also prevent users from capturing a fault symptom that is not related to a specific asset type.
Leveraging your data to enhance predictive maintenance
You will experience immediate benefits using the Fault function in Asset Management. Breakdowns are often fixed to simply “get the job done”, without determining why it occurred and what can be done to prevent future faults. Carrying out a simple root cause analysis, prompted by the core setup and step-by-step prompts in Asset Management Faults while doing feedback on the work order, will ensure an organized structure for reporting.
Future use of Fault data
Your Reliability and Maintenance management teams can use the historical data to see how many times a fault code occurred on an asset, the Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) and the failure rate. They can use this data to create a reliability-centered maintenance strategy to ensure more cost-effective maintenance with improved up-time of assets. By analyzing the data, you can:
- Determine if PM schedule intervals need to be adjusted
- Include additional tasks to be performed on PMs
- Run Fault data analysis for quicker, easier breakdown assessments
- Use data analytics to prevent faults from occurring. Typical examples are training needs for technicians and behavior of assets under different conditions as recommended by OEM’s (Original Equipment Manufacturer)
- Associate criticalities to determine potential effects of an asset failure on operations
Where do I get Fault codes?
Your Maintenance technicians are the best source of information. Many of them have been working on your assets for years and they keep record of their experience in spreadsheets, documents, a pocket notebook or if you ask them, they will share their knowledge not previously recorded.
The OEM can also be a source of information. Additionally, there are many articles on the internet on Failure mode, effects, and criticality analyses (FMECA).
Analytics and reporting
By using Faults in Asset Management, you will have a snapshot view of asset breakdowns to help you make informed decisions about corrective actions.
Asset Management in Microsoft Dynamics 365 has a range of Inquiries and Reports to provide the information you need to assess your asset performance.
Why use Faults in Asset Management?
- Help improve MTBF on assets faults
- Create improved standards for maintenance work practices
- Identify trends and problems on assets
- Review, evaluate and optimize PM tasks
Need more information or would like to see a demo?
Connect with our experts at Arbela.