After 40 years of decline, the textile industry is now growing again in France and in industrialized countries in general. At the heart of this renewal are innovation and new technologies, including CMMS (computerized maintenance management software).
In an extremely competitive globalized context where controlling production costs is crucial, innovative solutions are indeed essential to maintain and develop the profitability of textile companies in countries like France where incompressible costs are numerous (labour, taxes, energy…).
CMMS software enable a textile factory, regardless of its size, to rationalize and improve the maintenance of its machines. It thus gains in quality and efficiency. Indeed, a good maintenance of the machine fleet ensures production continuity, improves the company’s technical and economic performance and guarantees the quality of its products.
Maintenance in the textile industry
The textile industry covers all activities related to the preparation of textile fabrics and materials: preparation, spinning, weaving, etc. In developed countries, the sector increasingly includes activities with a high technological content: high-performance textile materials, non-woven fabrics, etc., and high-end production in general.
Although the activities of the sector are very diverse, maintenance is still a crucial issue. Indeed, machines play a key role and the pressure of costs and deadlines make efficiency and quality of maintenance crucial. In addition, the safety of operators is a particularly important issue in the textile sector.
These machines can be of many types: spinning, texturing, sewing or weaving machines, fabric winding machines, warpers, slitting machines, quilting trolleys, etc. Their number and variety make their maintenance particularly complex.
Maintenance common issues
While the majority of structures must constantly reduce their costs and use innovation as much as possible, many textile companies still manage their maintenance operations through paper or Excel monitoring.
These methods do not allow rapid access to equipment data, and increase the risk of human error, loss of information or unnecessary travel. For example, it is difficult for technicians to properly record all the information required for maintenance operations. Some tasks such as ordering spare parts may therefore be duplicated.
In addition, teams cannot communicate effectively with each other, and they lack an overall vision of the interventions to evaluate their maintenance strategy and eventually evolve it.
CMMS: benefits for the textile industry
To address maintenance issues in the textile industry, more and more companies have adopted CMMS software. These facilitate the operations of maintenance teams by allowing more accurate monitoring and analysis of interventions on the machines.
Facilitate identification and inventory
The machine identification and inventory is a permanent challenge for the maintenance department: the machine fleet of a textile factory is often composed of hundreds of equipment, some of which are sometimes identical. By adopting such a solution, a textile factory makes the task of its teams easier. Each machine is thus assigned a precise sheet, and all are grouped together in the software.
Create your equipment sheets in the maintenance management app Mobility Work in order to trigger tasks and activities
Enhance traceability thanks to the CMMS
The traceability of maintenance operations on textile machines is an important issue. On the one hand, good traceability allows efficient handling of intervention requests and consistency in them, which promotes the company’s overall productivity.
On the other hand, the traceability of interventions is often of crucial importance during audits. It has a direct impact on the company’s operations, transparency and results. If it fails, it causes confusion within the different departments.
The implementation of software allows all teams to access requests for service, the list of maintenance tasks in progress or already performed, the necessary documents, etc. Communication and information sharing are thus much simpler and more fluid than with a follow-up by paper or Excel documents, which are often tedious to consult.
Planning and analyzing
In addition, the use of a CMMS makes it possible to plan advanced maintenance operations thanks to a structured intervention schedule. In addition, the history of past operations and its analysis allows field technicians to save a considerable amount of time. Finally, such software centralizes intervention reports, thus facilitating their analysis and supervision by team managers.
Next-gen CMMS at the service of the textile industry
However useful they may be, traditional CMMS solutions have important limitations: these software are very restrictive, not very ergonomic and are not accessible on smartphones or tablets. New mobile solutions such as Mobility Work open up new opportunities for the textile industry and make maintenance management even easier.
A mobile solution
Thanks to mobile applications such as Mobility Work, maintenance technicians in the textile industry have real-time access to all machine information from their smartphone or tablet. During an intervention, they only need to scan the QR code or NFC chip with which each of them is equipped to consult this information. In addition, GPS coordinates can be entered to facilitate quick access to the machine.
As soon as the maintenance task is completed, teams can write a report on their mobile media, which avoids any type of information and time loss due to travel induced by a non-mobile solution. Input can even be done by voice command and multimedia documents can be added.
In addition, the ergonomics of the Mobility Work maintenance management platform has been designed to encourage rapid appropriation by its users, in the same way as digital tools for the general public. Its installation in a textile factory is therefore quick and easy: the use of the application does not require any training. All employees can therefore use it, which is particularly valuable in the textile industry where each machine often has only one operator.
The power of community
The Mobility Work platform, inspired by social media, offers a community-based approach. It is therefore an easy channel for the exchange of best practices, spare parts, supplier evaluation, etc. All users can thus benefit from this sharing of experience.
In practice, this system has many advantages both internally and externally. Internally, within the same factory or group of the textile industry, it allows the smooth sharing of information between the various departments concerning the maintenance of the machines. Operators can, for example, easily communicate their needs to the maintenance teams.
Mobility Work CMMS is based on a community of users who exchange and follow their plant’s activity thanks to the newsfeed
Externally, having access to the application’s user community provides the opportunity to share opinions and information about suppliers, to exchange feedback. These exchanges can be done anonymously.
How Big Data benefits predictive maintenance
The use of Big Data allows Mobility Work users to enter the era of predictive maintenance. Once confined to both corrective and preventive maintenance, the CMMS is now becoming an even more effective tool.
Based on data collected from thousands of anonymous business users, the application’s forecasts go far beyond the history of a plant’s machines alone. They thus make it possible to prevent potential breakdowns and anticipate the interventions to be carried out, which represents a significant advantage in terms of costs, respect for production deadlines and machine reliability.
In addition, having a predictive maintenance tool makes it possible to greatly reduce the physical risks associated with a possible machine malfunction. In the textile industry, where there are particularly many interactions between machine and operator, this is an important step forward.
Predictive maintenance is therefore a major asset in the service of production continuity by limiting the probability of machine downtime to a minimum.
You are interested in maintenance management and you want to learn more about the topic to enhance your productivity and save money?
