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Asset management promotes health and safety for manufacturing ops

4 minutes

Manufacturing facilities have a lot of moving components, and everything came to a screeching halt at the start of COVID-19. Safety once simply meant ensuring protective eye coverings or wearing the right shoes. The pandemic redefined the meaning of health and safety to include space planning and maximization, HVAC management and cleaning.

For busy manufacturing M&O leaders, keeping up with new health and safety compliance regulations on top of already long lists that include machine maintenance, production quality, workflow management, inventory, and hiring can feel like someone has thrown a wrench into your gears.

Especially if you lost those lists because you jotted them down on paper.

But, what if we told you that it was easier than ever before to keep it all running smoothly while meeting new health and safety compliance standards? (Like, as easy to use as a mobile device).

With cloud-based manufacturing tech like computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS), and other data-centralizing tools, M&O managers can improve things like asset reliability or scheduling to help cover all the bases — health and safety included.

Centralizing data and communication for the health and safety win

The biggest challenge for anyone working on paper or disconnected systems is, well, actually there are a lot of challenges: communication, scheduling, tracking inventory or inspections, just to name a few.

Many manufacturing professionals have long resisted going digital, but now is the perfect time to upgrade from spreadsheets or post-its. As hiring continues to be a challenge across industries, it’s critical to capture legacy information before it walks out the door. It’s also helpful to have the right tools to help the next generation of manufacturing workers want to take the job in the first place.

As health and safety takes center stage, and businesses are doing more with fewer resources in every category, M&O leaders need to simplify what it takes to manage manufacturing assets to ensure adequate attention reaches each task.

Smart solutions can offer a clear perspective to operations managers to help them make the most efficient use of their teams, time and assets.

How health and safety is an asset management issue

When you think about manufacturing workplace health and safety, asset management might not be the first thing that pops into your mind. But, if you can better understand and manage the machines, facilities, inventory and people under your responsibility, you can ensure the best utilization of assets to maximize resources.

There is a cache of benefits M&O leaders can realize by implementing smart tools. Asset Essentials™ helps reduce maintenance costs, improve productivity and enables manufacturing leaders to make smarter operations decisions — important when you’re adding space planning and maximization, HVAC management and cleaning to your to-do list.

Reliability is the secret ingredient to promoting safety

Whether your manufacturing business is in food and beverage; paper, plastics or rubber products; metal fabrication; or oil and gas, chances are reliability could be the difference between smoothly running operations or complete chaos.

  • For physical things like machines or facilities, proactive and preventative maintenance can go a long way to make sure that business never stops. Asset management tools can help M&O managers track the health and status of machines to help keep them functioning at optimal levels.
  • When you think about strategy, such as scheduling workflows, repairs or even inventory replenishment, technology that leverages data gives leaders the visibility necessary to always have the right amount of anything for each task.
  • Boosting compliance doesn’t have to feel like a chore. With health and safety earning more attention than ever before, asset management tools can promote well-maintained plant floors, ensure HVACs are up to snuff and improve risk management by finding problems before they occur.

If organizations can provide M&O teams with tools to increase reliability, there is a better chance that business can run smoothly, injuries or equipment failure can be minimized, and most importantly, revenue can stay out of the red.

Brightly helps M&O departments achieve compliance efficiency

Whatever metric your team needs to hit, Brightly can help you reach it to take your manufacturing operations to new heights — safely, of course.

By gathering information from across your manufacturing organization, our tools deliver visibility and actionable insights to help leaders like you optimize resources and keep everything running smoothly, safely and in peak health.

Need a real-world example? Learn how Brightly is leveraging healthcare and critical environment experience to launch EAM in the food and beverage industry.