Reprinted with permission from Maintenance Technology, August 2013

Most organizations rely heavily on a CMMS or ERP (enterprise resource planning) system like SAP® to manage maintenance activities. That means planning and scheduling of repairs, inspections and shutdown activities involved in time-based or condition-based maintenance (regardless of origin) must run through their CMMS/ERP master systems. Since most asset-health indicators (condition monitoring, inspections, real-time sensors) exist in third-party systems, the ultimate success of the maintenance program depends on the integration between them and the CMMS/ERP to help identify and plan PM. That’s where DINGO’s Trakka® software comes in: It allows asset health data to be received and then transformed, via DINGO’s Asset Wellness™ network, directly into condition-based maintenance notifications in the SAP PM (Plant Maintenance) module, through a Web service.

With all maintenance work tracked in the one system, items like PM Compliance can be reported on quickly. However, as many of DINGO’s large customers have discovered, PM Compliance only reports that the PM is completed within some schedule—not if it was effective. Determining PM effectiveness requires follow-up testing and inspection to ensure the defect has been fixed and that the asset has been returned to a healthy state.

While CMMS or ERP systems are excellent at managing task completion, they often lack the flexibility or detail to facilitate this full condition-based maintenance workflow of inspection, troubleshooting, repair, documentation and proof of repair. The Condition-Based Maintenance Workflow offered by DINGO’s Trakka® software overcomes those deficiencies: It provides powerful analytical tools to identify abnormal component conditions identified by predictive and preventive maintenance inspections and data, and creates the necessary tasks to rectify these problems.

DINGO’s Trakka® software has been integrated with SAP® Plant Asset Management (PM). Together Trakka® and SAP PM now provide users with integrated approach for managing a proactive condition-based maintenance program to optimize Asset Wellness™.