Posted to News on 12th Sep 2014, 00:00
SKF Tool Audit service expands to fully optimise plant maintenance
The SKF Tool Audit service, which was introduced as a new way to improve maintenance practices at a facility, has now developed to help engineers achieve fully optimised plant maintenance. The service increases customer awareness of good practices and helps identify improvement opportunities for upgrading working methods and tools at facilities.
The audit is conducted using the SKF Tool Audit app on an iPad, enabling the auditor and customer to walk around the facility gathering photos and audio recordings while answering a structured questionnaire. The answers identify key customer needs, drivers and priorities, so that products and solutions that add real value to the customers operations, and provide swift ROI, can be offered.
At the end of the audit process, data is uploaded to a web app and a final report is returned to the customer. "SKF offers are ranked in order of customer drivers," explained Andy Mynett, Platform Deployment Manager, SKF. "This enables the customer to prioritise the items that mean most to them.
"The automatically generated report also draws together factors that identify opportunities for increased efficiency. For example, if during the audit it was noticed that a) the belts are in poor condition, b) the customer always buys belts based on price and c) belt failures often cause loss of production, the automatically generated report may offer enhanced SKF belts together with a SKF Belt Alignment Tool. Users of the SKF Tool Audit Service have typically achieved significant improvements in efficiency by acting on the results of the audit."
