MAINTENANCE 4.0 - 2nd article Our vision – Its stakes

As we will see later, the two needs are far from being contradictory – quite the reverse, in fact. Some of these issues and shortcomings include:

• Lack of access to high-quality information in the right place and at the right time
• Little effective feedback from the ground about incidents and the roll-out of missions
• A much higher rate of accidents in this sector
• Failure to pass on instructions from one team to another during complex jobs
• The isolation of technicians when faced with sometimes complicated or unexpected situations

Our vision of the needs of the maintenance technician of the future was developed quite naturally. The needs focus on data and process management, collaboration, mobility and user-friendly practices, along with the guarantee of safety and efficiency.

Of course, all these points do not concern maintenance alone, and the issues can easily be applied to other trades, such as production or logistics, for example. Nonetheless, maintenance and operations (its twin brother) are still our core interests.

As we saw above, there are two main driving forces behind digital transformation, which also go hand in hand:

• Growth: 55% of world industrial investments by 2022 ($493 M).

Maintenance professions help their companies to grow by improving on quality from start to finish through the concept of digital continuity. But they are also becoming an essential part of new services, for example, ones linked to:

• pay-per-use with guaranteed availability
• the use of data gathered on the ground. Concerning the quality of the product, its use, etc.

• Competitivity: 45% of world industrial investments by 2022 ($421 M).

Some major and directly linked issues:

• Reduction of costs / difficult working conditions: robots, going paperless
• Higher reliability of installations: predictive technology, machine learning
• Flexible operations: joint management, availability of information when out on call
• Faster learning processes: augmented reality, digitisation of production standards, mistake-proofing, building on skills
• Reduction in the number of steps in a process: 3D printing, new processes

In each of the articles in this series, we will highlight an issue in digital transformation in the maintenance professions.

In the next two articles, we will look at two themes relating to competitivity: improving the reliability of installations and going paperless.