Panda

The challenge: The aim was to harness the professional skills and know-how of service personnel

– Service personnel have experience and knowledge that is essential for managing machines and processes. When developing for improving the manufacturing rate, the knowledge is essential, says electrical and automation expert Arto Liimatainen.

Liimatainen continues by saying that although subcontracted maintenance is in principle cost-effective, the roles do not remain clear, as in this case, the interests of the subcontractor and main contractor are partly conflicting. It is challenging to personalize information, which plays a significant role in development work.

The solution: In-house maintenance system ensures data is retained

Panda has approximately a decade of experience with Pinja’s systems. Maintenance has been monitored and controlled using the Maint by Pinja system, and usability has been developed with Machine Track. When maintenance was outsourced, the maintenance company also used the Maint system. Panda acquired its own license in connection with the change, and the historical data was transferred to it.

– We have data on the maintenance history of machines of almost two decades. The transfer to Panda’s server was effortless; everything was performed on schedule, and Pinja helped us transfer the data. After a test transfer, we found that everything worked as expected, and then all the data was imported into our information system without any problems. The thing that helped here was that historical information was originally defined as our property.

In the past, the problem was that the two programs operated in the information systems of different companies, which meant that their data could not be easily linked together. For example, a prolonged production outage observed in the monitoring was not directly transferred to the maintenance organization for investigation. Liimatainen says that they also wanted the maintenance transfer to take place according to actual operating hours. Therefore, they wanted to transfer the running time data directly from Machine Track to Maint. This enabled correctly targeted maintenance and a reduction of the workload of our organization.

Software in collaboration

As a result of decades of work, Pinja has accumulated expertise in various production, research, and product development applications. The unique process knowledge of high-tech RFID production, and testing and quality assurance systems, are areas of particular expertise in the services provided by Pinja.

The multi-generation test systems delivered to Smartrac have been developed using National Instruments’ measurement and control hardware and software. Pinja has been National Instruments’ trusted Silver Alliance partner in Finland for more than ten years and provides planning, consulting and development services for NI’s hardware and software through its extensive production team.

Effortless and agile cooperation

Both of Pinja’s software perform specific tasks, and they work together. Machine Track monitors the operation and utilization of machines and thus gives a clear picture of the functionality of production. Now it will also start placing maintenance orders when a pre-set runtime is reached. This function is called RTM, Real-Time Maintenance. Even in the event of prolonged downtime, Machine Track responds to it by sending a fault report to Maint. This function is called ACM, Automatic Condition Monitoring.

Production workers have access to a familiar, browser-based interface. It can be used to log fault reports and acknowledge the causes of various faults in the system. Liimatainen says that the system is almost perfect because reliable usage data and reporting will not be created without tenacious maintenance.