Assets are the heart of any manufacturing company. Production equipment, instrumentation, IT systems, even delivery trucks — without these things, a company has no way to sustain its business. The problem, however, is that assets need attention. If they are not maintained properly, the result is costly downtime.
"Our business is predicated on how good our equipment is, how good our assets are," says Glenn Kormanik, vice president and general manager of Service Heat Treating, a Milwaukee-based company that works with OEMs applying a heat process to their products in order to change the metallurgical structure. "If equipment is not running effectively or optimally, then we are not able to make our revenue targets."
Service Heat Treating, however, is not in the maintenance, repair, and overhaul (MRO) business. As a result, the company, like many manufacturers in the down economy, had to come up with a viable asset management strategy.
While competitive pressures demand new capital investment, today's economic conditions tend to preclude new purchases. Yet, businesses need to run at peak performance levels — from the server room to the production line — in order to ensure that customer demands are met. Meanwhile, baby boomers are retiring, leaving a gap in the number of skilled professionals who understand MRO operations. Collectively, these conditions are placing new emphasis on enterprise asset management (EAM) applications, which monitor the health of corporate equipment.