Latest trends in Textile industry maintenance management

Evolution of Textile industry

Textile Industry has witnessed a tremendous growth worldwide in the past few decades. The products of the industry are indispensably used for manufacture of apparels and hence can never run short of demand. With numerous players in the industry and the stiff competition in the market, textile manufacturing units are seeking the support of Information Technology to improve their Maintenance Management and Supply Chain Management (SCM) and use the same for the winning edge over their competitors.

After experiencing a dullness long ago before 4 or 5 decades, the resurgent textile industry had been thriving globally, especially in industrialized countries . In the twenty first century new technologies in production, production automation along with textile industry maintenance solutions / CMMS (computerized maintenance management software) have been revolutionizing the industry.

Loopholes in Traditional Methods

Establishing maintenance management structure is the need of the hour. Before the advent of CMMS, corrective maintenance was the prevailing approach. This was not an intelligent way of managing textile maintenance operations owing to the following reasons:

• Scattered information whose reliability, quality and accuracy were questionable
• No effective way to follow up service requests
• Difficulty in gathering data on equipment downtime, work order expenses etc
• Ineffective warehouse or inventory management causing undue delay in supplying parts
• Safety of operators was at stake due to ignorance on safe practices and PPE kits
• Papers could easily get lost and not available on time which delayed fixes. Handwriting, spelling mistakes, language skills added to the inherent complexities of traditional approaches
• Difficulties in right interpretation of work instructions

Digitalization of textile manufacturing maintenance

The day-to-day operations in a textile industry include all activities pertaining to the manufacture of textile fabrics and materials including spinning, knitting, weaving etc. In well developed and developing countries, the sector increasingly encompasses activities with high degree of technological content, high-performance textile materials, non-woven fabrics, etc.

The blending of Information Technology with Operational Technology is completely revolutionizing industrial processes. Industrial organizations are transforming into digital enterprises. Technologies such as Cloud computing, Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, Industrial Internet-of-Things (IIoT) etc are being incorporated to enhance the landscape of industrial maintenance for quality, scalability, effectiveness and cost-efficiency of processes.

Significance of Textile Maintenance Management

There is a widespread misconception among the manufacturing community that the role of maintenance is a trivial one when compared to other aspects of factory management. When operations run smoothly, people rarely recognize the significance of maintenance. On the contrary, when any machinery pulls out everyone concede that preventive maintenance is quite necessary.

When a textile manufacturing plant comprises so many pieces of machinery it is highly advisable that you employ an in-house maintenance team. Such a set up will be cost-efficient and reduce major dependencies on external organizations for maintenance to resume the production cycles quicker.

CMMS for Textile Industry

With a cloud based textile industry maintenance software, each and every data on technical specification of assets, user manuals, work instructions, troubleshooting guides, service history and transactions on maintenance can be stored in a safe and secure environment and retrieved within minutes. Furthermore, CMMS automates all the maintenance operations so that chances of forgetting will no more happen.

Many textile firms have started realizing that CMMS has got to play a crucial role in effective maintenance management and they rely heavily on its information systems, team collaboration mechanisms, technologies, truly mobile operations which are in line with the next generation trend in maintenance management.

Preventive Maintenance in Textile Mill

A typical textile manufacturing plant has hundreds to thousands of assets. Among these many assets play a crucial role in production and many are identical too. Correct identification of assets quickly without confusions is a must for quicker preventive maintenance.

A CMMS would:

• organize assets in vertical and horizontal hierarchies
• permit bulk upload of assets from excel sheets into the system
• establish location hierarchies to help technicians to easily identify the specific building, locations, and floor of the equipment.

A good CMMS software will in addition provide:

• interactive site map and floor map which gives you a holistic idea of how many assets, in a room,  go for maintenance at a time. LED indicators may be used for the purpose.
• Provision to trigger preventive maintenance schedules straight away from this map or a convenient 52 week PPM calendar & scheduler.
• flexibility to trigger schedules for all asset instances belonging to a particular asset model or for specific assets.
• dynamically change the schedules while it is, in progress. The changes will come into effect from the very next maintenance cycle.

InnoMaint is one such world class CMMS software which is more than a CMMS- an Enterprise Asset Management(EAM) software indeed capable of bringing all types of assets – spinning, texturing, sewing or weaving machines, fabric winding machines, warpers, slitting machines, quilting trolleys, etc under its scope.

Asset Tracking in Textile Industry

How the whole lot of assets and equipment be tracked and managed in the best possible and latest way? How many assets have really reached the stage of disposition? How to precisely track assets that are in constant move within the facilities? An able CMMS that remains updated will simplify the answers to the above question by including workflow for textile mill predictive maintenance, move management, precise asset tracking using RFID/BLE Beacons etc. Textile predictive maintenance software keeps unnecessary service expenses under check by alerting maintenance only when a breach in normal parameters of the machinery occurs.

Thanks to CMMS which turns these complex jobs into a simple job. A good traceability paves way for efficient handling of intervention requests and operational consistency, which in turn promotes the company’s overall productivity.

How Big Data benefits textile maintenance

How many of the complex machineries genuinely need maintenance? The use of Big Data allows the users to enter the era of predictive maintenance. The workflow automates condition based monitoring. Inspection tasks are automated so that the values of key parameters are monitored continuously. Whenever there is a breach you can create schedules that get fired automatically to initiate corrective action.

Easily manage work from anywhere 24×7

From time immemorial, textile manufacturing maintenance softwares have gained notoriety for being unnecessarily complicated. They were difficult to use; lacked flexibility, user friendliness and were not customizable. InnoMaint is putting a full stop to it. We provide robust capabilities with simplicity. It requires no special language skills, technical skills or special training to use the software. Any staff can raise an emergency service request straight away even if he/she is unregistered in the application by just providing name and mobile number and track the status of the request easily through completion.

It’s fully loaded with asset centric features, that makes your job easier, boost productivity, improve efficiencies with a cloud environment which is a whiff of fresh air that saves you from outdated and expensive maintenance software. InnoMaint is one among the first-mobile native app with truly mobile capabilities enabling you to be in the loop of maintenance able to assign tickets 24×7 at the comfort of your shopping place or holiday destination getting instant visibility into the big picture on maintenance.