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Michael Thomas
Plant and Controls Engineer
Dunlop Aircraft Tyres Limited
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) and Fiix Asset Risk Predictor (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. In the last 12 months, their maintenance software portfolio has expanded to include the use of Fiix Asset Risk Predictor to predict and prevent unplanned downtime on two of the facility’s most critical assets.
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.
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.
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:
Beyond maintenance benefits, Dunlop was the first non-North American Rockwell Automation account to adopt Fiix.
After about a year of using the Fiix CMMS, Michael heard about this new predictive maintenance tool, Fiix Asset Risk Predictor (ARP), during one of his calls with his Customer Success Manager. His interest was piqued as they had tested something similar in past, but the solution wasn’t as robust or as developed as what Fiix ARP was promising.
Michael felt that ARP would be worth the effort of testing because it could predict and report when an asset is at risk of failure. They took their time to make sure they would get the most out of the new integration and found a good fit monitoring two of the facilities' most critical assets.
When they first implemented the new solution, Michael was interested in seeing how it performed daily, the new concept felt a bit foreign to the team, but it was cool to see how the risk levels changed based on maintenance work performed the day before.
They’ve since switched to receiving a daily risk dashboard report using the scheduled dashboard delivery option in ARP. Using a scheduled delivery means that a copy of the ARP dashboards is sent right to Michael’s email at the start of each day. This allows him to look quickly at the dashboard and decide whether there's anything that requires immediate attention.
With the power of both a CMMS and a predictive maintenance tool in place, root cause analysis of past failures could be performed by quickly cross-checking with the other systems they use to record temperature and pressure.
They’ve also set up the system to prepare automatic work orders based on individual asset risk thresholds. When a predetermined number of ‘amber alerts’ occur over a short period of time, the system will push out an automatic work order using Fiix Asset Risk Predictors, Prescriptive Maintenance feature.
“Using risk scores has been really helpful,” says Michael.
Their plan is to introduce little improvements like Fiix Asset Risk Predictor and slowly adopt Fiix Maintenance Copilot to the plant with the ultimate goal of limiting firefighting and reactive methods by improving the health of their machines.
While they’re taking their time to build out the usage of Fiix ARP across the rest of their assets, the good news is that they haven’t seen any full-blown failures yet and will continue to look for other opportunities to utilize its features.
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.
The best way to get to know Fiix maintenance management software is to get your hands on the actual product. Go ahead. Take it for a spin.