Efficient machine management is crucial for successful maintenance operations. Visual management has emerged as a method to optimize processes using techniques that emphasize visualization, taking asset efficiency and control to a new level. It’s applied in various industry segments today.
What Is Visual Management in Maintenance?
Visual management is a method used to improve maintenance management. It takes a macro view of the facility and uses techniques that prioritize clear and expanded visualization for better machine management.
By adopting this approach, it becomes possible to quickly identify problems, analyze trends, and take preventive/corrective actions promptly.
The ability to generate data for performance evaluation has become a necessity for any organization focused on making sense of routine maintenance actions.
When information is easily accessible, people have more autonomy to make data-driven decisions and solve problems quickly.
Visual management can be applied in various methodologies. Among them is Kanban, a visual method for workflow management that uses cards or boards to represent tasks or projects. This allows teams to track and visualize the progress of activities clearly and in real-time.
Another great example is control dashboards, which can be presented with graphs or panels, enabling real-time visualization of key indicators for maintenance teams.
On the TRACTIAN platform, for instance, TracOS™ users have access to automatic reports – updated in real time – on the main asset management indicators. This makes it easy to use data for decision-making, visualizing intuitive graphs of Availability, Reliability, MTBF, and MTTR numbers, for example, as well as ongoing activities and budget utilization in the department.
TRACTIAN Floorplans 2.0: All Your Facilities in One Virtual Hub
TRACTIAN understands the importance of effective visual management for maintenance results, and that this methodology needs to be accessible and actionable for everyone. That’s why, based on requests from customers worldwide, we’ve developed Floorplan 2.0, a central hub of virtual plants where you can have a map view of all monitored machines and their information.
This tool is available for customers using Smart Trac and Energy Trac sensors for condition and energy monitoring. Floorplans allows you to create virtual plants for all systems and subsystems of your operation, customize the map, visualize the plant in different ways, set filters to enhance your view, as well as other exclusive features.
Here are some of the new features of TRACTIAN’s Floorplans 2.0:
- Set viewing modes (map, card, and display)
- Create a floorplan for assets
- Location marking on the plant
- Asset and receiver icons
- Links and shortcuts
- Multiple floorplans for the same location
- Configure screen transitions
- Filters
By using this floorplan tool, visualization and results are taken to a new level; the power of immediate management is enhanced by providing an intuitive interface that presents all important information clearly and in an organized manner .
This feature allows for an immediate visual understanding of machine locations and their distribution in the factory. Additionally, the status of each machine is clearly displayed and updated in real time, thanks to the platform’s Artificial Intelligence that’s combined with IoT sensors installed on the machines. This provides the team with a complete overview of performance, any issues, and numerous filtering and customization possibilities.
In a context where technology plays a crucial role in process optimization, the floorplan stands out as an evolution of traditional visual management techniques, which already fulfill their role effectively. We made these changes to offer a truly transformative solution to maintenance managers, combining visual management with advanced technological resources, allowing them to save time, effort, and resources.
After all, with the necessary information gathered and available in real time, there’s an agility gain in identifying faults, reducing response time, and increasing the effectiveness of actions.
Macro visualization of machines contributes to more proactive and strategic management, enabling more efficient allocation of resources and more effective preventive and prescriptive maintenance.
With the Floorplan tool, TRACTIAN aims to provide its users with an advanced virtual experience where all mapped plants and monitored machines can be viewed simultaneously, offering a complete real-time view of the state of each machine.
Want to learn more about how to effectively monitor your industry’s equipment with one of the best monitoring systems? Schedule a free demonstration and talk to one of our experts.
