Dunlop Tyres

Dunlop Aircraft Tyres Limited – Committed to Aircraft Dispatch Reliability

Dunlop Aircraft Tyres Limited is a medium-sized manufacturing facility in the UK. With a strong focus on improving efficiency and transitioning from reactive to predictive maintenance, the company integrated Fiix CMMS (opens in new tab) into their operations. This case study explores the challenges faced, solutions implemented, and the tangible benefits realized by the team led by Michael Thomas.

Michael Thomas, Plant and Controls Engineer at Dunlop Aircraft Tyres Limited started using the Fiix CMMS in 2021 and has been with the company for nine years.

The challenge: Overcoming reactive maintenance before Fiix CMMS

Like many other manufacturing teams, Dunlop Aircraft Tyres started its maintenance journey rooted in reactive methods. As you can imagine, relying on reactive maintenance is well... not a reliable or effective way to keep a manufacturing facility running. They were constrained by a lack of on-site engineers, which meant doubling the workload of the engineers who were on-site. But that wasn’t the only thing keeping them in this reactive bubble, before Fiix CMMS, maintenance data was stored in an in-house database built on Microsoft Access. The database had no capabilities for scheduling or planning maintenance work, and those tasks would be done on paper and Excel.

This slowed them down tremendously, making it even harder to escape the daily firefighting that comes with a reactive strategy.

If they wanted to improve production this maintenance management process wouldn’t cut it.

The decision: Why Dunlop Aircraft Tyres chose Fiix CMMS

Longevity was a key factor in choosing software, they needed something with a bit of a legacy behind it. Fiix Software was a newly acquired software company under the Rockwell Automation brand and since Dunlop's plant floor equipment is mostly controlled by Rockwell Automation PLCs (opens in new tab), the established trust in the Rockwell brand made Fiix an easy sell.

In terms of software needs, the company was looking for a system that could view machine history and historical work order data. Lastly, their engineers needed to be able to login and access their work from a phone or tablet from anywhere in the facility.

The solution: Day-to-day use of Fiix CMMS

After implementation, the impact of switching to Fiix CMMS was pretty quick for the team. “We saw improvements within the first few months,” Michael says. The use of the CMMS includes producing daily reports for plant managers who would have otherwise been left to create these manually. “There has been a tremendous time savings,” Michael exclaims.

The reports generated using the analytics tool are created daily and are key to tracking things like Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF), which they report on in their weekly maintenance meeting.

Beyond reporting capabilities, some other benefits included:

• Better time management: by eliminating paper and Excel and improving access to machine data through the CMMS, the team wasted less time finding answers and more time-solving problems.
• Enhanced decision-making: access to daily and weekly reports facilitated better decision-making, allowing plant managers and the maintenance team to address issues proactively.
• Improved data quality: they noticed that the quality of data they were collecting greatly improved. It was free from human error, aiding in more accurate scheduling and resource allocation.

Beyond maintenance benefits, Dunlop was the first non-North American Rockwell Automation account to adopt Fiix.

Fiix CMMS: A match made in heaven

Moving forward, the facility aims to continue leveraging technology to optimize maintenance operations, affirming the significant role of digital tools in industrial maintenance management.

Check back in as we continue to follow Dunlop on their journey along the maintenance maturity spectrum.