This article about digitising maintenance is based on experiences shared by the speakers during an online Pointury event on September 15, 2021, where 15 digital leaders met with Amista and Pointury.
Carel Jonckheere, Former Digital Railway Project Director at Infrabel
Infrabel is responsible for building and maintaining the railway infrastructure and planning the trains.
The "Smart maintenance" program was launced 6 years ago. The program looked at maintenance applications, planning applications (for maintenance personnel) and safety applications (for example, to prevent trains from driving on tracks where maintenance activities take place).
The goals of this program were to improve safety, keep costs under control and respond to the shortage in the labor market for technicians by reducing their workload.
The basis for digitisation is data. A signal that is not included in the database (already 11,000 signals uploaded) will never be maintained. Data comes from the prescribed maintenance periods of parts (every 6 months or every so many actions), is based on counters, measuring devices (temperature, moisture, wind), from historical data or comes from external sources such as the RMI (e.g. location of land lightning strikes) or from inspection measurements. For example, Infrabel regularly measures the distance between the tracks, cracks in the steel, the position of the overhead lines and the operation of switches. The measurement data is used to plan repairs or to predict similar problems in traces of the same fate.
Measurements can come from the self-diagnosis of PLPs, from control equipment in railway crossings, from sensors on trains or sensors built into devices such as transformers or from measurements of temperature, moisture and wind. Based on these automatic measurements and historical data, artificial intelligence can then predict when preventive maintenance should take place.
Digitising measurements sometimes requires the use of new technology. Instead of sending a team on site to measure 10 track switches per day, trains with measuring equipment allow to measure up to 80 switches per day and can measure the quality of the tracks ultrasonically. This does require that these trains run a specific route, allowing them to pass over all switches in the two possible positions of a switch. This in turn requires separate planning applications. This has the additional advantage that fewer people have to walk between the tracks and therefore increases safety.
Another technology that has increased efficiency is Lidar (Light Detection and Ranging). Such devices are placed on measuring trains to detect where vegetation needs to be pruned next to the track.
Meters are no longer read manually on site, but remotely via IoT. This avoids relocations and human errors. Most parts of this digitisation program have already been realised.
Bert Schoofs, Global Head of IT Applications at Etex.
Etex has 84 production sites worldwide, mainly in EMEA, and has been running on a single instance SAP ECC environment for more than 20 years, but with different ways of working. SAP PM is used for maintenance in more than 70 factories, but not harmonised and with a lot of manual work.
In addition to harmonisation, as much as possible is already being digitised. To be able to use mobile maintenance solutions, a good WiFi connection must be available everywhere in the factories. Another requirement is the availability of measurement data. When these measurement data are missing, replacements are planned at a higher frequency. This is as a precaution as the downtime of certain machines would lead to chaos in the factory..
Michael De Wilde, Group IT Manager at Stow Group.
Stow Group historical makes shelving. In addition, Stow now also produces robots to help automate warehouses. After some acquisitions, the focus is on “one brand, one company” and for IT on a high-performing “one instance SAP instance”.
As with most SAP customers with a 20-year-old ECC system, many workarounds and heavy customisations have been built over the years. This made upgrades a very risky and expensive business, which was then abandoned. This means that sooner or later a green field SAP S/4 implementation has become inevitable.
In terms of digitising maintenance, Stow still has a long way to go. One of the functionalities to be implemented is predictive maintenance.
Since the introduction of robots to the product range, an additional goal is to provide digital support for service technicians on the road based on SAP Field Service Management (FSM) to carry out maintenance of robots directly at customer's sites. It is important that digitisation steps are taken in the right sequence.
Geert Vanvaerenberg, CEO of Amista
Geert has more than 20 years experience with maintenance modules in SAP. In his early days he even delivered an SAP R/2 RM-INST ("Instandhaltung") project (predecessor of SAP PM). During these years he has witnessed a number of new developments first-hand such as the work clearance module initially built for the nuclear power plants in Tihange or the implementation of SAP-FSM at Balta. Like Infrabel, the future is very much based on preventive maintenance, by analysing data from IAT and other sources with AI. The ideal configuration is when Next to S/4, SAP's customer focused modules (sales cloud, commerce cloud) are implemented and also the service modules such as SAP Field Service Management (FSM) so that all information about a customer is easily available to the people who should know.
In general we notice that maintenance departments are often not seen as a priority for IT investments, while there are very good business cases. Attention often goes to sales-related processes and not to maintenance and service. But to give a customer a perfect experience, both sales and service must be integrated and digitised. Customers are now used to such experiences in a B2C context being informed by their e-com suppliers every step of the way about the status of their order.