Maintenance Event Tracking

Maintenance processes are an integral part of operating a manufacturing facility. Maintenance processes aim to ensure the continuous and efficient operation of machinery, equipment, and other types of assets. An effective maintenance program is essential to the successful performance and longevity of machinery, assets, facilities, and entire businesses.

The company uses a combination of preventive and corrective maintenance and does want to better understand how many of these events are preformed, what is done and when they are done. With these data, the company looks to better understand if the approach of preventive and corrective maintenance is working for their needs.

The company does us Litmus Edge for collecting data from the PLC controllers of their assets. The company uses several Litmus Edge devices each dedicated to specific production line. Part of the data collected is the state of the assets, which does include if the asset was set into maintenance mode.

Further does the company use a Litmus Partner solution for manual process execution which also does link with Litmus Edge to record the data recorded by it.

Using Litmus Production Record Database, the company has deployed a data model for recording maintenance events. Recorded are beside the start and end date and time also the asset, what type of maintenance and each step including its start and end date and time. The event is identified by its unique maintenance order code.

The raw data are all send a process tag to Litmus Production Record Database and the internal event monitoring capability is used, making it not necessary to deploy custom code onto each Litmus Edge.

When starting maintenance, the technician selects the order they are about to work on. The order ID together with several other meta data such as the operator ID, maintenance type are send to Litmus Edge which is also used to set the PLC into Maintenance mode.

This will trigger the recording of a new maintenance event identified by the maintenance order ID, another part of the data which is provided is the operator ID as well. As each asset has its own trigger monitoring configuration based on the assets specific tags, the asset is recorded as well together with the type of maintenance.

As the technician does follow the instruction given to him to perform the maintenance, every time they start or stop a maintenance step, these signals are also send to Litmus Edge, from where they are also send as process tag data to Litmus Production Record Database. Where they allow to record them as part of the maintenance event, giving a complete breakdown of what the technician did and how long it took.

Notes taken by the technician are recorded in their report and can be manually added later to the maintenance event as well.

Once the the maintenance event is finished, the asset is set back into the standby state, allowing it to be used for production again. This is the end trigger of the entire event and does close the event on Litmus Production Record Database.

The picture below shows a graphical representation of the data model.

The orange box shows the Node Name and therefore the name of the Data Model.

The blue boxes show the names of Operations at Level 1.

Green Boxes show Items recorded. The Purple box is the Item which is also the Identifier for a Maintenance Event. The Identifier is what users will typically use to retrieve the data.

Data Models can be created using the Litmus Solution Litmus Production Record Data Model Configurator.

The picture below shows, which tags have ben defined on Litmus Production Record Database to be used for both event trigger monitoring and as data for the recorded event.

The orange box represents the device, which is related to the devices defined on Litmus Edge, as Litmus Edge is the data source sending the data using the MSSQL integration and the flow provided by the Litmus Solution Litmus Production Record Tag Message Conversion Flow

The blue boxed represent the tag names while the green box is the item and the purple box the data type. All of the tags are defined as process data and not meta data.

Tags can be created on Litmus Production Record Database using the Litmus Solution Litmus Production Record Tag Configurator.

The picture below shows the two main events which are responsible for starting and ending a maintenance event.

Every time a technician executes a maintenance event, these two events will always be recorded.

Based on the type of maintenance, optional steps can be executed.

The picture below shows for one of these optional steps, which are represented as Level 1 Nodes in the data model hierarchy. In case such an event is recorded, it is attached to the currently recorded event identified by the identifier of Order ID.

Notes are recorded by the technicians currently in their maintenance report which is currently not linked to a data recording system.

The event monitoring configuration can be defined on Litmus Production Record Database using the Litmus Solution Litmus Production Record Internal Event Configurator.

The picture below shows how flexible the data recording for each event can be. The first event highlighted in yellow, had only one operation be executed.

While the second event highlighted in green, had three operations where one was run twice, shown by the Occurrence number.