Since the dawn of the industrial revolution, one unexpected manufacturing event has always resulted in a loss of money: downtime. From malfunctioning equipment to insufficient labor to misallocation of parts and materials, downtime can come from anywhere. And its monetary impact adds up quickly. Drops in production, destruction of customer goodwill, and costly repairs are just a few of the unwelcome surprises.
As-a-service ups the stakes
Fast forward several hundred years. In the midst of Industry 4.0’s emergence, the importance of downtime has only increased. Consumers and manufacturers alike increasingly favor outcome-based business models (like subscriptions) rather than incurring the capital expenses and maintenance burden of asset ownership. Now, almost everything is sold as a service, from underwear (yes, underwear subscriptions are a thing) to cities purchasing clean roads by the mile as opposed to buying, operating, and maintaining street sweepers. In as-a-service models, asset downtime no longer just equates to increased expenses but also to an immediate loss of topline revenue.
Simplifying asset maintenance
Asset maintenance in high tech and industrial manufacturing offers an instructive example. For those organizations, maintaining assets is tremendously complex. From the factory floor to support infrastructure, asset-service processes must account for workforce schedules, parts and materials, customer communications, configuration and history, knowledge, contractual obligations, and field coordination. And to make matters even more complex, three or more different companies might be responsible for asset ownership, operation, and maintenance. Most organizations surmount these challenges through the investment of millions in manual labor and a patchwork of complex IT projects.
However, there is a simpler way if customer, supply chain, maintenance, and financial systems all work in concert. An example is Oracle Fusion Cloud Asset-based Service. It includes the new Oracle Fusion Cloud Service, Oracle Fusion Cloud Supply Chain & Manufacturing (SCM), and Oracle Field Service. Among other things, it supports these key use cases:
1. Proactive Monitoring and Maintenance: The best way to prevent downtime is to service an asset before it breaks. With Oracle Asset-based Service, departments have visibility into equipment health via remote monitoring of IoT-connected equipment. The solution can automatically send alerts and schedule maintenance, preventing problems before they occur and minimizing the impact of downtime. In addition, Oracle Asset-based Service can store asset-specific preventative maintenance plans and automatically assign them to service personnel when work is required.
2. Automated Field Service: Even with the best predictive and preventative maintenance plans in place, occasions will arise when a product does not operate to spec. It is imperative to get the assets back online and keep downtime to a minimum. Oracle’s Asset-based Service solution can activate self-healing routines, send communications to impacted customers, and automatically schedule urgent on-site service. When service technicians are on-site, the application provides all the resources needed to troubleshoot and fix a problem correctly the first time and will automatically address contract compliance such as billing adjustments.
3. Depot Repair Automation: When assets must receive service in-house, Oracle offers end-to-end depot repair solutions that include the automatic generation of repair estimates and authorizations, work-order creation, and parts ordering directly from an employee’s workspace. All maintenance activities are linked to service orders, charges, shipments, and invoices to help maintain accurate billing and accounting.
Learn more
With these three solutions working together, the whole is much greater than the sum of the parts, particularly for asset-intensive industries such as high tech and manufacturing. To learn more about Oracle’s Asset-based Service for high tech and manufacturing, visit us here.
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