Pareto’s law or principle (or 80-20 or 20-80 rule) is a theory which states that 20% of the causes are responsible for 80% of the effects. It can be applied to several fields and sectors and is considered one of the most famous maintenance method in the industry that you can probably find in your CMMS Software.
Whether you are studying maintenance in an engineering school or working in a maintenance methods service in a company, failure analysis is directly linked to Pareto diagrams, whose goal is to hierarchize the causes of a phenomenon.
Pareto and CMMS: Towards an evolution of maintenance analysis
Definition and process
The main goal of this distribution is to classify maintenance interventions according to their frequency and then to rank them according to their priority. The steps required to create a Pareto diagram are:
- gather interventions per type of failure
- classify those groups in ascending order
- work out the total number of interventions, or the time spent according to the type of diagram that you are willing to analyze
- work out the percentage per group: intervention number/total time spent/total
- create a graph to get a Pareto curve.
Example: Cause of engine overheating
Although this might seem simple, there are unfortunately several indispensable variables which differ from maintenance classes compared to the on-the-ground reality: the quality of entered data in the maintenance management software, data extraction and data analysis.
Issues linked to actual CMMS solutions
The quality of the data entered by maintenance technicians in maintenance management software is one of the main issues for maintenance services. As a matter of fact, the lack of user-friendliness in maintenance software, the outdated design and interface, the multitude of fields to be filled and the fact that maintenance management software are so difficult to use make of data entry a real obstacle course for the assigned technician.
A poor data entry can result from a bad communication between technicians. If no data or tangible benefit is observed, then this work will be vain, and the data value loss significant.
Mobility Work is an affordable and efficient solution
That is the reason why Mobility Work offers a user-friendly interface, as well as a newsfeed inspired by famous social networks. The technician can quickly access the work which has been carried out on a similar breakdown by one of his colleagues a few weeks earlier. Data entry process then takes on its full meaning and allows them to improve directly their daily work. Technicians will be able to take efficient decisions by referring directly to the information available on the maintenance management software. If a particularly difficult maintenance task is executed every Monday morning, Mobility Work’s analytics tool helps you justify this task and suggest improvement or investment likely to impact directly the technicians’ daily work.
The second issue with current maintenance management software is data extraction and analysis. As a matter of fact, it is essential to be able to gather relevant data regarding maintenance interventions, but you need the right tool to proceed to dynamic analysis. We are used to CMMS software which requires to realize Excel extractions in order to analyze them after two hours of work. To avoid all this calculation, we integrated a dynamic tool in order to analyze your interventions in the Mobility Work maintenance app.
The analytic tool available in the mobile CMMS Mobility Work helps you to analyze your maintenance data
Finally, Mobility Work’s vocation is to place the CMMS at the heart of the company. Community-based, the first maintenance management platform allows to easily improve communication, not only between teams (day shift, night shift, external service providers, etc.), but also between departments (production, purchasing, quality, etc.). Error margins and communication failures are easy to eliminate and allow to improve decision-making.
Questioning Pareto analysis
However, one question remains regarding Pareto: is it a good way to determine the failures on a piece of equipment? Mobility Work’s philosophy is different. As you may have understood, we improved the quality of data entry tools available in our maintenance management software : ergonomics have been simplified, we involved mobile technologies, etc. We also provide a diagram which enables to obtain the most used words (in terms of frequency or intervention time): the more used the word, the bigger. For example, the most frequent words on the piece of equipment “grinder” are “screws”, “gear” and “control”. This enables any maintenance user, without any extraction or IT knowledge, to access in a few seconds to the most frequent issues on a piece of equipment or a production line.
Industry 4.0 solutions brought us to question the relevancy of Pareto diagrams. Those are obviously extremely useful to analyze failures, but there are also efficient and affordable ways to simplify this analysis and obtain similarly, or even more detailed and exhaustive results. Our CMMS provides all industry players with a community-based maintenance management platform, as well as an ultra-efficient integrated analytics tools. To learn more about our solution and adopt 4.0 solutions, do not hesitate to contact us to schedule a presentation of the Mobility Work platform.
