La performance of your industrial equipment is one of the keys to competitiveness of a factory. You pay particular attention to the selection and sizing of equipment to offer the best compromise performance/investment cost/operating cost to your customers.
During their operation by your customer, your equipment is monitored and maintained in order to ensure the best possible availability and maintain the expected level of performance.
Today, it is often the manufacturer who ensures all the monitoring of the equipment as part of the activities of its new works, production and maintenance teams. While part of the maintenance is sometimes delegated to you, it is very rare that you are in charge of managing the performance of the equipment.
The knowledge around the equipment is shared between you who have built your experience on a large number of installations in service, and your industrial customer who has specific experience in using the equipment on its process.
Whether as part of an improvement or problem solving process, the ideal approach would be one capable of combining both experiences.
This approach allows both:
The main obstacle is the sharing of information, and what is more, of relevant and unbiased information. Every manufacturer has experienced endless and ineffective exchanges with one of its suppliers for equipment that was faulty, or no longer ensured the expected level of performance. Several elements lead to this type of situation:
This situation offers you a opportunity to differentiate yourself through your service offer to ensure that your customers make optimal use of their equipment over the long term.
The implementation of such services is now facilitated by the possibilities offered by digitalization, or digital transformation, from the industrial world. It is now entirely possible for you and the user factory to exchange equipment data in real time.
From then on, everything becomes possible: the industrial site can benefit almost immediately from your advice and recommendations, and thus gain in efficiency in the optimal use of its equipment.
The introduction of this type of services also drastically changes the type of relationship between you and your industrial customer. First of all at the contractual level, with the provision of recurring services in the form of subscriptions or in the form of performance contracts.
But also at the organizational level, with teams who will be in charge of remotely analyzing the operation of your client's installations and who will be able to make proposals, whether with a view to improving or correcting them to prevent problems from emerging.
Resources will therefore be reallocated from “firefighter” activities to solve problems urgently, to more planned advisory activities in an proactive manner.
If you put in place actions to ensure the performance of your equipment over time and in a transparent manner for your customers: