The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) promises to disrupt business paradigms across a broad spectrum of industries by transforming strategic and operational processes. The maintenance, repair, and operations supply chain is particularly suited to the opportunities the IIoT offers.
Point-of-Use Data Integration
Intelligent vending machine technology and infrastructure seamlessly collects, sorts, and categorizes MRO supply and material usage information. SDI extends these capabilities to integrate and automate supply chain functions based on internet-enabled point-of-use data collection. Our partnership with Auto Crib has created machines that transmit vending distribution to sophisticated enterprise resource planning platforms, where proprietary algorithms determine when and in what quantities to reorder indirect material SKUs. This integration pays off in several ways:
• Enabling centralized replenishment
• Tracking usage and cost by department, employee, project, customer, and more
• Ordering triggered by, reducing carrying costs and stockouts
• Just-in-time delivery in response to immediate, confirmed need; no slow-moving and obsolete inventory (SLOB)
With a suite of smart vending solutions optimizing consumables’ availability and controlling demand, SDI assists clients in expanding their MRO operations into a coordinated asset-management strategy – one that will lower total cost of asset ownership and improve efficiency.
Coordinated, Predictive Maintenance
Connection with the IIoT allows industrial equipment and manufacturing components to self-examine, self-diagnose and even self-prescribe solutions to potential breakdowns. A partnership with SDI means critical spare parts are on hand when our clients need them and to schedule maintenance and repair tasks when they will cause the minimum disruption to production.
By continually monitoring and assessing vibration, temperature changes, torque, pressure, and other factors and comparing readings to manufacturer’s recommendations and field experiences, SDI’s software can reliably predict part failures. Armed with this information, maintenance engineers can plan maintenance and replacements based on real-life, real-time conditions, eliminating costly emergency repairs, maintaining quality, and keeping workers safe.
Prescriptive maintenance facilitated and governed by information available on the IIoT not only helps operators when and why a part is likely to wear out, it also can present them with scenarios describing the consequences of such a failure. They then can weigh the lost productivity of, say, shutting down a machine to replace a component against the risk it will fail and the costs associated with the potential failure.
Improved Supplier Performance
Just as smart vending monitors and manages MRO demand, SDI’s IIoT interface monitors dozens of web portals to ensure the supply side runs efficiently. Driven by SDI’s advanced metrics, our cloud-based tracking and analytical tools remain ever vigilant, scouring millions of data sources and overseeing hundreds of suppliers and confirming they adhere to contracts, pricing, quality, order fulfillment, shipping deadlines, and more. Our service delivers actionable reports through an intuitive dashboard, from which strategic supplier decisions can be made based on intricate metrics gathered through a variety of tools:
• Data mining
• Forecasting
• Benchmarking
• KPI scorecards
SDI believes that constant monitoring equals constant improvement. Completely scalable and customizable, our supplier performance monitoring service increases visibility across spending areas, manufacturing locations, and vendors, while also uncovering opportunities to gather marketplace intelligence, foster supplier/customer relationships, and reduce variance, risk, and costs.
SDI Brings It All Together
SDI combines IIOT-available data collection, analysis, presentation, and action into coordinated processes and streamlined supply chain operations. Contact us today to learn how our supply chain-as-a-service solutions can consolidate inventories, eliminate hidden costs, and keep production humming along.
