Pharmaceutical

Your holiday wish: Fact-based maintenance planning?

Production efficiency is always affected by maintenance problems. Many manufacturing companies do not really know how their production equipment is performing, and the maintenance planning is often based on simple time-based rules for regular maintenance activities.

One of our Factbird customers have been collecting data from their pharmaceutical packaging lines for the last two years and they used it to steadily improve the efficiency and overall equipment efficiency (OEE). Like many Factbird users, they were using the live data for monitoring production progress and performance and especially for analyzing the OEE.

Recently the customer started to use Factbird View on one of the packaging machines where there were many stops. Nobody had knowledge about what caused the problems. It was giving the maintenance team a headache and they decided to get some facts to analyze the machine performance. They ordered a Factbird View. It was shipped to the site within a few days and it was easily installed by the customer.

The customer was quite happy because they could install it without any change to the machine configuration, as changing existing set-up is a major challenge in the pharmaceutical industry according to the Good Manufacturing Practice (GMP) regulation. This solution had no impact on any GMP issues, as there was no need to change the existing setup.

After the quick installation, the video data was all in the Blackbird cloud and the maintenance team started to get a lot of good information from the camera. As the video data is synched with the production count data of the packaging machine, it is also easy for the maintenance team to trace the problems and watch the relevant video. They get to know when the machine stopped and get to watch the video of that moment by clicking on the Blackbird Application. They can watch the video even on their smartphones remotely.

Now whenever the machine stops, the maintenance team does not have to guess why. They just go on the Blackbird application to watch the video, which was just what they had wished for.