How often do you get a chance of industrial visit for the product you are working on?
Yes, our newly formed Enterprise Asset Management team from Bangalore got a chance to see how our product SAP Enterprise Asset Management is being used in TVS Motor Company, Hosur (Tamil Nadu). This was a great opportunity for us to get an exposure to the industry.
The visit inside the company was guided by Mr. Vasu and the agenda included a presentation from Mr. Saji and his team on current SAP PM utilization in the maintenance of plant. They started using Plant Maintenance in 1998 for the maintenance of hundreds of equipment, which has been expanding since then and now they are eagerly waiting to leverage the power of IOT with sensor based technology to reduce their manual work.
They are using breakdown maintenance very efficiently and usually around 20-25 notifications gets created per plant in a day which also includes 2-3 major breakdowns. Once the user raises the notification, engineers /technicians performs the fix and closes the notification with the time it took. The plant is very closely integrated with SAP PM which really helps them to optimize time and increase productivity. Breakdowns leading to production losses needs Root Cause analysis to avoid it in future. So "WHY WHY" analysis is done by including the causes in notification, which is a very effective approach. This information is then presented to the Senior Management on vital breakdowns where necessary actions can be taken.
While presenting the slides Saji made a comment "We need more beautiful screens, there are lots of other non-SAP apps present in market with beautiful screen but yes of course there is nothing inside them”. This symbolizes the sheer power SAP has in the market and how we listen to our customers as we already have a team in place to do the verification of UI's.
To identify the health of the plant, MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) and MTTR (Mean Time to Repair) figures are used by the team. The system determines the MTTR and MTBR key figures based on the individual history of an equipment. These figures help them while taking decision for purchasing new equipment.
To run at peak performance machine needs to have regular maintenance. Maintenance plans are used by the team to define dates and the extent of preventive and inspection maintenance tasks which can be planned for equipment. Every 27 seconds a vehicle is produced, so imagine the kind of loss which the company will incur if the engine goes for a breakdown of 2 hours. Maintenance team uses preventive Maintenance of SAP PM to avoid such production breakdown.
By the end of the presentation, Saji quotes "it gives them so much confidence by knowing SAP will be working towards the betterment of the product."
After finishing up with the presentation, we took a tour of the plant where bikes are being manufactured. Every day, around 950 vehicles are manufactured here and it gives sheer pleasure when you know your product helps them to achieve this. It was very captivating and thrilling to see the assembly line production and use of high tech robots for inspection and assembly to ensure less work force and uncompromised quality. With our luck being so good we got a glimpse of the new BMW Bikes G-310 R getting assembled along with Apache RR310 and Jupiter from TVS family.
Insights into the inner life of a global brand, directly into the heart of the corporation will surely help us to deliver excellence in our product.
