One of the key elements of Digital Machine Health is a proactive maintenance culture. Here are six simple steps that you and your organization can take to create such a culture.

Almost a year ago, an industrial manufacturer decided to implement continuous monitoring with Augury. Their machine maintenance team was accustomed to being reactionary. Not only in the way they dealt with scheduling and executing repair tasks, but also in their processes—such as using quarterly vibration analysis services that only provided “moment-in-time” snapshots of the operating condition of their assets. 

Shortly after implementing their new Digital Machine Health solution, they received their first health report. It was eye-opening. A significant portion of their process and utility equipment were exhibiting extreme levels of vibration, indicating that major mechanical malfunctions were already present or imminent. At Augury, we anticipated pushback from the site level team, as the report put a spotlight on the operating condition of some of their most critical assets—but that wasn’t the case. 

The machine maintenance team embraced the transparency and quickly worked with customer success to develop a phased action plan. They decided to focus on the machines with the most severe faults first and work their way down. Within three months the facility had all of its critical assets operating safely and efficiently. Seeing these results made the team confident that the insights provided by continuous monitoring would enable them to get ahead of mechanical problems, prevent failures and reduce unplanned downtime with a proactive maintenance culture. 

Prioritizing machine health and enabling plant personnel with useful technologies and insights leads to a more productive and proactive maintenance culture. Keep in mind though, technology alone cannot help you achieve machine health—site-level buy-in and adoption are essential for a true cultural change.

Here are some simple steps that you or your organization can take to transform into a more proactive maintenance culture.

1) Be The Change

For organizational culture to actually change, it needs to be led from the top, with managers and executives employing a set of tactics to start driving the transformation. But even with leadership from the corporate level, facility and operational level buy-in is crucial. Key stakeholders from the teams who will be using the new tools and held accountable for the new programs need to be included and consulted in the decision-making process to bring in new technology. The users must understand and see the potential value of implementing the new technology at scale. It needs to be approached as an initiative to transform the organization as a whole and not a short-lived “science project.”

2) Enlist Influencers

In every facility, there are champions and up and comers who are eager to do their best, but rarely have time to work on new projects. That’s because they’re the people who step up when problems arise. The individuals and employees with extreme knowledge and the respect of their coworkers are the best champions of new products and solutions. They will be the best influencers for the new initiative and need to be brought on-board early. It’s also helpful if they are given a platform to share their successes.

3) Create A Vision

Culture change needs a clear vision, and goals. Managers need to help employees imagine a better and less stressful maintenance culture. Sure, at first it’s shocking to see that many assets may not be in the best condition, but what if you could get them all running in optimal shape and prevent them from downgrading again? Setting achievable goals including reducing downtime, increasing productivity, or optimizing PMs can help direct facilities and teams to commit to the program’s success.

4) Have A Plan. Stick To It

Everyone needs to be on-board with how to reach those goals. Corporate stakeholders need to align with plant leadership and the two must collaborate in developing the program in order for it to succeed. Once the plan is in place, it’s important to demonstrate ongoing commitment and communication between individual sites and corporate stakeholders. Finally, regular employee training helps increase buy-in across the operation and makes sure everyone knows what their part is in the new initiative.

5) Don’t Boil The Ocean

Cultural change isn’t about finding and implementing a simple solution. It’s a long-term shift that takes time, energy, and commitment. Being realistic about how much can be achieved, and by when, is essential. It’s the crawl, walk, run approach—while envisioning running from the beginning. Program leaders need to produce measurable results and allow for momentum to build as the wins start rolling in, faster and faster. You have to think about the big picture and understand that every small success means that you are heading in the right direction.

6) Kill Them With Success… And Data

For true culture change, implement software systems and data collection wisely.

Document how your sites are operating. Track successes and share your findings openly. Collect and compare data from facilities that are using the new technology and those that aren’t. Pay attention to the data that illustrates befores and afters to show the tangible changes that come from Digital Machine Health. The more your teams document, the more they will see the benefits of the program, which leads to more team buy-in and greater program success. 

After implementing Digital Machine Health technology and ensuring you have representation at the corporate and site level, you can effectively pivot away from a reactive to a proactive maintenance culture. When supported and provided with the right tools for the job, the attitude and work habits of site-level personnel can transition away from simply fixing things when they’re broken, toward keeping machines running at their very best. In this way, Machine Health program leaders can quickly and effectively change organizational culture. 

Are you curious about implementing Digital Machine Health? Request a demo.

The post Six Simple Ways To Create a Proactive Maintenance Culture appeared first on Augury.

Digital machine health solutions for the Industrial Internet of Things(IIoT) are transformative. They immediately change the day-to-day operations of facility leaders — and successful programs can influence executive leadership priorities. So there’s a clear need for both facilities and their technology vendors to be on the same page from the initial rollout all the way through program expansion. The key to ensuring that new technology is adopted at the site level, used properly, supported, and delivers the results you’re looking for is a Customer Success program.

Customer Success is not just a department, but a prerogative—-a new paradigm. It’s a way to help customers simultaneously learn new technology while unlocking and delivering value across their entire organization. This is especially important in the IIoT space where simple decisions around scale and compatibility can have massive consequences both positive and negative.

In order for a digital IIoT solution’s customers to thrive, an advanced Customer Success program is essential—one that ensures customers are educated, empowered, and fully supported throughout the customer lifecycle.

The Three Pillars of Augury’s Customer Success Program

Augury’s Customer Success team is based on a customer-first, company-wide approach. Whether it’s building new processes, strategically consulting on reliability practices, or uncovering insights to optimize maintenance operations—all of our efforts are directed at increasing customer value.

The core function of Customer Success is to ensure that customers have the right knowledge, support, and tools to make impactful decisions and fully capitalize on their investment as fast and completely as possible. We approach this by staying true to our three pillars: Reliability, Training/Education and Support.

1) Reliability

Reliability is both an art and science. Augury provides the sensors, software, platform, training, actionable alerts, and ongoing support—but we need our partners’ in-depth knowledge of their assets to truly be effective.  There is a lot of value in partnering with our customers to augment our “science” data with their real-life knowledge of their machines. These folks are truly intimate with the context and history of the assets they are responsible for. Together with Augury’s diagnostics, we combine the best of both worlds to enable our customers to make more impactful and data-driven decisions.

The professionals that perform repairs and ensure asset integrity are the final step to delivering the full value of a machine health solution. Without their diligence in performing the recommended corrective actions, informed and detailed alerts cannot deliver their promised value.

Our machine learning algorithms utilize vibration, surface temperature, and magnetic data to deliver insightful diagnostics for site teams to act upon. However, it’s also very important for Augury to understand machine context (historical repairs, operational modes, failure history) to get a more holistic picture that will augment our analysis.

Augury has a team of Customer Success Managers (CSMs) that are trained in the importance of machine context and communicating with on-site reliability teams to make sure they’re getting the most out of their machines. In short, a machine health solution needs input from the professionals who know the assets on the shop floor—and maintenance teams know their machines best.

The key to our value delivery is that our approach is 100% customer-centric. By determining the goals of the program in the beginning we can guide the program to quickly achieve them. Whether their goals are reducing PMs, decreasing downtime or to create a roadmap towards digital transformation — CSMs are there to leverage our product and industry knowledge to help them achieve their goals.

2) Training/Education

This pillar is about enablement. In order to effectively train and educate, you must first listen and learn to become an expert. Our CSMs go through a thorough training and certification program that requires reliability training and extreme product knowledge in order to train and empower Augury’s customers. This is to guarantee that our CSMs have the skills to be the go-to person for any questions, updates, or advanced platform feature inquires our partners may have.

The core offering of a CSM is leveraging product knowledge and reliability expertise to apply the Augury solution to solve the customer’s challenges and objectives. Listening is the key component here. In order for a machine health program to be successful, our Customer Success team must understand the unique objectives that our partners are looking to achieve and the current state of their operations. This allows us to make sure our partner’s maintenance/reliability teams are trained and prepared to utilize the data and insights from our platform. It also helps them understand how to get the most out of Augury’s tools to achieve reliable machine health.

Initial training and ongoing education empowers our partners in the art of early detection and data-enhanced maintenance. This allows site maintenance and reliability teams to become proactive and demonstrate tangible value to the back office through increased uptime and reduced repair costs.

3) Support

Things don’t always go as planned—so it’s important to have the peace of mind that you have a dedicated staff to help you with any issues. Within customer success, we have a dedicated technical support team that is trained in addressing a wide range of issues/questions ranging from account specific inquiries to hardware and IoT troubleshooting.

There are various ways to get in touch with Augury’s customer support, it doesn’t matter how they reach out, we will make sure to go above and beyond to help our customers resolve issues.

Things don’t always go as planned—so it’s important to have the peace of mind that you have a dedicated staff to help you with any issues. And when you’re in a bind, it’s best to have a subject matter expert, someone you know by their first name, not a call center.

Augury’s CSMs are actively involved with the accounts they are paired with. They are familiar with their site operations and the general health of their machines. CSMs are another line of defense to protect your operations as they are able to see alerts and changing machine health statuses. They are also familiar with site and corporate level contacts so they know who to reach out to if any critical machine health alert requires immediate attention.

The New Paradigm

The days of transactional relationships between B2B technology vendors and their customers are gone. Customer success teams create and support business relationships creating true partnerships aligned with the same goals and success metrics. Speaking for the entire customer success team at Augury, we’re ecstatic to help you learn our technology, support your team, and to exceed your expectations when it comes to delivering the value of digital machine health.

Learn more about Augury’s Machine Health solutions here.

The post The Three Pillars of Customer Success: Ensuring Value Delivery at Scale appeared first on Augury.