This article is a follow-up on the article “A practical application of international maintenance standards in China”, published in 2010. In the past few years, Siveco China has gone much further and developed project guidelines for the implementation of international maintenance standards through the utilization of our technological tools. Those guidelines are used internally in our customer projects, as part of our ISO 9001-certified procedures.

In previous newsletters, we recapped key projects launched during 2014, with a focus on multisite clients in the process industry and in the automotive industry. This month we would like to share the experience of a multisite Facility Management project launched in 2014. Facility Maintenance is a confusing term. As far as we are concerned, our focus is on the management of facilities from a technical perspective, which includes maintenance and more generally technical risk prevention, a major and growing concern in the Chinese market.

Today, maintenance processes are no longer limited to the factory or the maintenance department: they are collaborative. For this reason, Coswin 8i Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) allows for interactions with other applications and Siveco provides a range of standard tools to integrate the system into the corporate IT environment.

Further to our GM’s article about Maintenance 4.0, I have received many interesting comments. The spirit of our Maintenance 4.0 initiative is to put fancy concepts into real, hands-on, industrial practice. Too often, companies are lost in a dream and little gets done in reality. Recently we see that some of our customers or prospects talk a lot about Big Data. Everyone talks about Big Data of course. Especially large IT and consulting companies… chasing Big Money.

The scope of Siveco’s Enhanced Support Contract has been covered in previous articles. Over the years more and more clients have joined the program, benefiting from it in various ways. For this month’s Reliability article, we would like to feature two practical examples from clients we recently visited during the week-long visit of Siveco’s Operation Director Guillaume Gimonet and Customer Service Manager Sunny Wang in Guangdong province in early April.

This month we would like to share another example of multisite maintenance improvement project, this time in the automotive industry. Although discrete manufacturing is considered less maintenance-intensive than process industries, maintenance can have a tremendous impact. This is especially true of automotive suppliers, facing stringent requirements for quality and just-in-time delivery from automakers, their clients.