Integration, not functionality, of maintenance system matters most

"We would like our plants to run at around 90-percent efficiency," says Ara Chakrabarti, CIO at Portola Packaging, a San Jose, Calif.-based producer of plastic closures and containers used in the food & beverage industry. "To improve plant and machine performance to that extent, we need plant intelligence acquired using a maintenance management system." Intelligence, in this sense, includes both real-time and historical data on machine and plant performance.

Manufacturers value the role of maintenance management software, says Marc McCluskey, a research director with Boston-based analyst firm AMR Research, in assuring that scheduled maintenance is done on time and performance doesn't drop due to unexpected machine failure.

Independent maintenance management vendors include Mincom, Datastream, Indus International, and MRO Software. But most of the major ERP vendors also offer maintenance management packages, since, adds McCluskey, "companies now demand something better than loosely coupled systems."

ERP vendor Glovia Internationalintroduced a plant maintenance module for its glovia.com software suite last spring, says Randy Ehler, an executive VP with the company. While Glovia concedes the plant maintenance module probably won't attract new customers on its own merit, the vendor believes combining maintenance management functionality and ERP will push sales.

"Our customers are moving away from a best-of-breed approach and toward a single platform because they've been burned on integration," says Quentin Brearly, director of product management at Glovia.

Portola Packaging offers a ready example: it used a best-of-breed maintenance solution, but the results didn't meet expectations, Chakrabarti says.

Lack of integration between the maintenance management and ERP systems caused numerous problems. Specifically, issuing a purchase order for a part to be used in maintenance was done via the maintenance system, but then redone in the enterprise system. "That's just one example of the type of complex duplication—and sometimes triplication—of work we faced," says Chakrabarti.

"Furthermore, because the maintenance and ERP systems weren't well integrated, we couldn't roll up data and mine it from an enterprise perspective," adds Chakrabarti. "To make matters worse, people on the plant floor found the system difficult to use—they instead relied on spreadsheets."

Portola, which worked with Glovia to develop the plant maintenance module, played a major role in testing and currently is implementing it in four U.S. locations. Chakrabarti expects the module "will offer significant benefit by giving us access to historical data to monitor machine and plant performance, as well as see the big picture of how we spend money on maintenance."