Automotive Supplier Increases Maintenance Staff Productivity 20%

by Lori Carpenter

A major automotive supplier has increased maintenance staff productivity 20% by implementing a computerized library that provides instant access to drawings and manuals in a single pilot plant. In the past, paper maintenance documents were spread throughout the firm's six plants, which meant that a considerable portion of the staff's time was spent tracking them down. The time required to find the right document could cost tens of thousands of dollars in lost production if a major piece of production machinery such as a transfer line used for machining axles was down. The firm eliminated this problem by implementing a software package that provides maintenance staff with instantaneous access to all important drawings and manuals through personal computers located throughout the plant. The key to the effectiveness of this software is its intuitive Microsoft Windows user interface that allows maintenance workers to become efficient users after only ten minutes of training.

American Axle & Manufacturing (AAM) produces a wide variety of automotive systems and components including rear axles, independent front axles, independent rear-drive systems (IRDS), propeller shafts, steering linkages, anti-roll systems, steering & suspension components, and forged products, primarily for SUV’s, light trucks and passenger cars. AAM was formed in 1994 when CEO & President Richard E. Dauch and two investors purchased assets and facilities from General Motors that had previously comprised GM's driveline, propeller shaft and forging unit. American Axle & Manufacturing has been focused on growing its core GM business while expanding its sales to OEMs such as Ford, Mercedes Benz, Isuzu and others. Today, AAM does business with seven OEMs and more than a dozen other customers. AAM has more than 8,500 employees and more than five million square feet of manufacturing space in seven plants located in the United States, Canada and Mexico. All of the company's manufacturing plants earned ISO 9001/QS 9000 certification a full year ahead of the industry deadline.

About a year ago, American Axle management became concerned that maintenance staff was spending too much time looking for documents which left them without enough time to do their jobs. A large amount of documentation is required to properly service many of the firm's more complex pieces of machinery. The many suppliers of equipment to the plant have provided several copies of paper binders containing instructions for maintenance and repair. In addition, most machines require mechanical, electrical, pneumatic and lubrication drawings. Tool routing sheets provide important process information. The plants are large so maintenance documents were stored locally at each machine to avoid the need for workers to have to walk to a central library. But local document storage meant that no one person was responsible for maintaining documentation in the right location and condition. Documents sometimes disappeared, which required that someone take time out to track them down. Often the storage areas became disorganized which increased the time required to find the right documents.

Fran Leo, factory information systems manager for AAM, was the driving force behind the movement to develop an on-line library to provide maintenance staff with immediate access to documents. Leo noted that the rollout of an Intellution human machine interface (HMI) meant that each machine or cell already had its own personal computer. The Intellution industrial automation software provides process monitoring and control, data collection and graphic display, historical trending, alarming, data archiving, security, and more. By using the Windows-based HMI system, maintenance staff and operators had increased their computer skills to a considerable degree and were already quite comfortable with the Windows interface. Leo conceived the idea of integrating the already familiar factory information system with an on-line library. First, he considered a traditional document management solution based on a high-end database. He discovered that the cost of implementing such a solution could easily run well into seven figures including necessary hardware, software, customization and training. Despite the magnitude of the savings that he was hoping to achieve, it would have been impossible to justify an expenditure of this magnitude.

Then Leo identified a consulting firm, Advanced Research Company of Orion, Michigan, that had considerable experience in implementing inexpensive personal computer based on-line maintenance libraries. Advanced Research Company applications engineer Sunil Vij implemented a software package that provides an unusual approach to retrieving information across a network – it minimizes hardware and software expense while providing excellent user response time. Paragon Virtual Library (PVL) from FESTech Software Solutions, Findlay, Ohio, uses proprietary dynamic pointer technology to provide a structure and access to existing information without requiring a database and delivers up-to-date information and documentation to any workstation on a local area network or wide area network. PVL also allows users to view and print documentation without the need for native applications such as AutoCAD, Microsoft Word, or Excel. PVL has over 250 different built in viewers and can be run as a stand-alone product or easily integrated with an HMI such as Intellution's.

"We carefully examined this system and became convinced that it would allow us to reach our goal of providing our staff with instantaneous access to the documentation they need to do their job at a remarkably low cost and with a very short implementation time, " Leo said. "The elimination of the need for a centralized database and its simplicity reduced the cost of the system to only a small fraction of what would have been required to implement a typical document management solution. We made the decision to implement PVL and to conserve our own staff resources by hiring Advanced Research Company to handle the implementation on a turnkey basis. We were also impressed by the fact that this software can not only handle our current paper documentation but also gives us the ability to make qualitative improvements such as by providing videos to explain difficult maintenance operations and giving supervisors the ability to redline manuals and documents."

Vij integrated PVL into the FIS so users can simply click an icon on the FIS screen to launch the library application. When the user launches the application, the first step is identifying the machine that they are working on. They can do this by selecting the machine by clicking on a graphical layout of the plant. Once they select the equipment, the maintenance person is presented with a series of tabs that allows them to quickly find the type of documentation they are looking for. One tab is CAD drawings, another is the manual, a third is process sheets, etc. When the user selects the CAD tab, they are presented with another series of tabs from which they can choose mechanical, electrical, pneumatic or lubrication drawings. Clicking on one of these tabs presents a list of available drawings with a description. A pilot showed that the maintenance staff can very easily find the documents they need with the new system. Only about ten minutes was required to explain the interface to individual users.

While maintenance staff typically uses the tree structure described above, the search capabilities of the PVL library provide an alternate approach. Users can enter keywords such as the name of a piece of equipment or its identification number to instantly find documents. For example, if they type in "weld" they will get a list of all the drawings and manuals that relate to the welding machines in the plant. Then simply double-clicking on the line item they are interested in will pull up the drawing or manual through the viewer that is bundled with the product. Once they find the item they need, they can easily pan around the drawing, move from page to page of the document, zoom into areas of interest and make a printout to take with them to the work area.

Now when a maintenance staff member receives a work order, he or she simply walks over to the nearest computer, locates and prints out the drawings they need to do the job in a minute or two. The elimination of the overhead of a high-end database makes it possible for the system to provide virtually instantaneous response throughout the company's plants even though it runs on inexpensive personal computer hardware. By eliminating the time that was previously spent searching for the right documents, the new system has substantially improved the productivity of the maintenance staff. It has also eliminated the potential for errors that could have occurred in the past if updated documentation was released and yet copies of the old documents were still floating around the plant.

For more information, contact FESTech Software Solutions, FESTech Corporate Center, 1219 West Main Cross, Suite 200, Findlay, OH 45840. Phone: 419-425-8555 Fax: 419-423-8844 Visit FESTech's Web site at: www.festech.com