As Account Executive for Mid-Market Manufacturing, Isaac Doss understands the main challenge of his clients: deliver on-time every time. He also knows a successful machine health program can make this happen. However, many mid-market manufacturers don’t feel ready to make the leap. “I say jump. The solution has been proven. You don’t have to be a billion-dollar-plus global manufacturer or have a sophisticated digital infrastructure. If you experience unplanned downtime, you are ready,” says Isaac.
Unplanned Downtime: Avoidable with the Right Approach
Full disclosure: I’m a football fan that loves to be loud at the game rooting on his team, celebrating, clapping, hi-fiving, and cheering them to victory.
Rest assured I never yell in my role as a sales professional. However when I start talking to mid-market manufacturers about their pain points, I get excited in a similar way. I want to cheer them through the specifics of how Augury’s solution is going to make their lives easier – to show them that unplanned downtime is no longer a fact of manufacturing life.
But then we often hit a bump. I need to first bust a series of myths on why they don’t feel ready to make the leap. So, I decided to write this article as a shortcut: so that when we talk, we can just dive into better understanding your specific challenges.
Making Time to Save Time
So, I hope you take the time to read this. I know you’re busy controlling M&R costs, optimizing your labor and spare parts, meeting capacity and quality demands of customers (who are not always overly loyal), etcetera… We both know there is a better way: to put a system and workflows in place that will give you and your team that forward-looking visibility – now that would be the ultimate game changer.
Augury’s Machine Health Platform provides real-time machine health visibility and prescriptive diagnostics to intuitively empower your team with the information they need to keep your machines running reliably, and to optimize labor and parts scheduling based on actual machine condition…
Oops sorry, I’m getting ahead of myself. It’s the excitable sales guy in me. So, let’s first hit pause so we can then fast-forward. Let’s bust some myths!
Myth #1: I need to first implement or, at the very least, chart out a digital strategy so I can meet Industry 4.0 head-on.
Nope. Some customers have actually used our solution as a springboard to begin their transformation into digitization. And I understand that you might have a bad taste in your mouth from earlier attempts in this direction. I know people who spent $50,000 on sensors and got zero value – because they did not know what to do with the data. We are the strategy – and the destination.
Myth #2: Without CMMS/MES/the perfect PMs, I’m just not ready for predictive maintenance.
If you ever have unplanned downtime, you are ready. Our solution can act autonomously and be integrated into any current platform. And if you are not doing this already, we can help you start to calculate and capture the value of avoiding downtime costs – the repair costs, lost production costs, the costs of the utilities running for nothing, the costs of having staff waiting around, etcetera.
Myth #3: I need to have highly-trained vibration analysts on staff
That’s our job. You don’t have to DIY it. We’re out-of-the-box simple and we explain it all clearly so any maintenance technician, regardless of their experience level, can quickly say: “I now know how to fix this machine – one that I would otherwise not know needed fixing until it was too late.”
While the younger generation coming up expect this sort of technology, the older generations find our solution extremely intuitive. This all helps explain our 90% engagement rates – a fact that links nicely with the next myth…
Myth #4: Nobody likes change at our plant – both management and those on the floor. They won’t adapt and adopt.
As part of our end-to-end approach, our Customer Success Team runs an onboarding and adoption program to ensure successful engagement on the floor, and the required change management across the company. This comes backed by a straightforward dashboard that tracks and presents your program’s ROI, adoption and engagement metrics.
Corporate is happy: because they can see how much money and time they are saving. They can also easily share it with their higher-ups. “Look! It’s going great!”
Maintenance management and technicians are happy: because there’s less stress and no more late-night emergency calls. If we are not alerting you, nothing is wrong. If we’re alerting you, something is wrong and you will have time to fix it. If you don’t see the problem, our experts will help you figure it out. We even have a $100,000 guarantee – because we don’t miss.
These are the types of changes people love.
Myth #5: To achieve long-term ROI, I need to make large capital investments
It will start saving you money immediately, and ROI is realized within months or even weeks. We’ve seen this play out repeatedly with both large and small organizations, many of whom have scaled this technology across their portfolio based on that quick time to value and overall success. The repeatable nature of our proven use case means it doesn’t matter if you have one plant or 50. That value can and should be realized across the organization. Plus, it’s a subscription model so it’s predictable and without any up-front hardware investment.
Myth #6: Sounds great. I know long-term, it’s the way to go, but I just don’t have the time for another project…
I get it. We’re all busy. But, we also all have goals. So finding the right initiatives to make the largest impact is crucial. What I love about Augury (and what drew me here in the first place) is the low-lift required for companies to put a successful program in place. This isn’t a CMMS deployment that takes years or heavy lifting by countless teams. Our white-glove approach ensures we’re able to place a program quickly and easily.
As for the time saved from the actual solution itself… Well, that’s why we’re talking. You’ll be freeing up time. Your team will be empowered to be more efficient, pointing you to the most urgent issues so you can avoid catastrophic failures. In other words, you don’t have to spend all your time fighting fires anymore. You’ll be able to fully depend on the machines that matter most to you.
Let’s Achieve Those Goals
You’ve probably picked up on how passionate I can be about this subject… I’m a passionate guy who loves understanding challenges, solving problems and achieving goals. Which is why I love what I do.
I’d hesitate to say that anything is easy in this world. But reducing unplanned downtime through technologies like Augury has never been easier. Let’s talk. Let’s go for the win.
Reach out by email or phone me directly at +1-(858) 752-9375 so we can discuss the specifics of your business.
