Tag-It Program Enhances Asset Management

Publishing Date: March 2021

Listen in to learn how Regal Rexnord’s Tag-It Program can help streamline inventory, reduce maintenance time and provide equipment health insights to reduce unplanned downtime. Host Carmen Ek is joined by Peter Mills, Regional Manager, Chris Schulte Global Strategic Account Manager and Caitlin Strassburger, District Manager and they discuss how this new solution can help customers employees be successful. Listen now!

Transcription

Tag-It Program Enhances Asset Management

Carmen: This is Community News On the Air, brought to you by Regal Rexnord Power Transmission Solutions. I'm your host, Carmen Ek. In this podcast series we'll be sharing tools, tips and new innovations to address some of the tough challenges our customers face. Overall, my goal is to help our customers employees be successful.

Hey there, and welcome to Community News On the Air. This is Carmen Ek, and with me today is Regional Sales Manager, Peter Mills, National Account Manager, Chris Schulte, and District Sales Manager, Caitlin Strassburger.

We're going to talk about some of the challenges that maintenance and procurement teams face in the unit handling industry. What I want you to think about is -- warehouse distribution, food facilities and beverage facilities.

So I'm going to turn to you first, Peter. Let's talk about some of those challenges. We were talking a little bit earlier, you mentioned some of those challenges to me. Why don't you get into some of the things that you've really seen out there in terms of tough things, problems that maintenance and procurement teams are facing today.

Peter: Yeah. Carmen, good question. Unplanned downtime is king. That number adds up extremely quickly. Because ultimately when you affect the production of the facility, that affects the bottom line right away.

Some other things that they experience -- accessibility to drive information. A lot of times the drive packages are in tough to reach areas, and having to bend over and break your back in order to gather the necessary information to make those interchanges is key.

Reading the document right the first time and then going back to the MRO Crib, and pulling the right asset off the shelf is also an issue.

Other stuff that that they deal with -- lack of manpower that's critical to the facilities and making sure that that downtime that I spoke of earlier is as minimal as possible.

Carmen: So they're dealing with a lot. It's not just one or two challenges. It's almost probably everywhere they turn, there's trouble, and trying to prevent trouble from happening so it doesn't get in the way of productivity. I can see how all these things can just make a day in the life, it's probably never a dull moment.

Peter: You are correct on that one.

Carmen: So, Chris, I'm going to ask you a question. Peter mentioned that identifying the part and making sure you have the right part going to the crib, and pulling the right part for replacement can tend to be a big deal. Can you elaborate on that a little bit?

Chris: Sure, Carmen.

At most of these types of facilities, the layout is very complex. We're dealing with plants and facilities with winding conveyors, lots of turns, crevices and high areas. And really, when it comes down to a maintenance department, they have to work around the complexities found in these types of facilities, and then they need to draw on the types of resources, whether it's a lift truck, a ladder to reach those high reach areas -- what is made available to them -- and that really takes up additional time, and it has them focusing on areas of the plant that require extra attention and take up time in place of doing other useful work in the facility.

Our program helps to alleviate all that and give back time to these departments, and really help them as far as the manpower, utilize this time more efficiently in their organization.

Carmen: How much time do you think it typically takes? Is it several minutes? Or could it tend to be an hour, Chris, just to even read a name tag to identify a part? You were kind of outlining there, they have to get all this equipment to try and identify the part that they need for a replacement. Does that tend to take a significant amount of time?

Chris: Yeah, it does, Carmen. Great question. On average, in a lot of the surveys that we've coordinated, and general observation of the maintenance people that we've observed, can take anywhere from 45 minutes to one hour. So the time adds up and its considerable. And it's really the savings and opportunity costs through our program that that allows them to get that time back.

Carmen: So you've mentioned our program. What you're talking about is our new Tag-It program, which is an asset management service that we're offering. And I'm going to turn to Caitlin. Caitlin, you've really been on the ground floor helping customers implement our new Tag-It program. Can you outline for us a little bit how this works and how it can address some of the challenges that Peter and Chris are talking about?

Caitlin: Sure. When we go in to do a Tag-It program, we actually go through the entire facility so that we can get an active inventory of all of the assets that are currently in use. With an app, we document them and literally tag it with a QR code. So that when maintenance folks or whatnot go back through they can scan the QR code, they know exactly what the asset is, all of the critical information for it. And then the idea is to then be able to interchange it to Regal Rexnord product offerings.

Carmen: That's great. And how does this address some of those challenges that we were talking about earlier?

Caitlin: I think understanding what's in your active inventory so that you can make sure that you have spares or you know how long it's going to take you to get, is going to help with how much downtime is, and/or planned downtime.

Carmen: Do you have any examples that you can share with us from some of the facilities that you've been working with?

Caitlin: One of the facilities in particular that we've worked with, their other goal behind the Tag-It was to standardize and consolidate their inventory. They've also talked to us about how much time it saves them, being able to go and just scan a QR code, or even on the dashboard on their computers, if they know what asset they're having problems with or that they're going to need to replace, just being able to look it up immediately and have the interchange cut down on how much time it takes. They don't have to necessarily go out to the asset, write everything down, hope that it was written down correctly, go back to the maintenance area, check and see if they have it on the shelf or place an order -- it's a huge time saver.

And being able to do more and faster work with less people is, I think, what everybody is faced with right now, and this is a really great program to help achieve that.

Carmen: You and I were talking offline and you were telling me about this -- one of your customers is a shoe warehouse. And you were talking about, you saved them some time and that really started to add up. Off top of your head, can you remember how much time you were saving them annually as you added it all up and what that total cost savings was?

Caitlin: Yeah. Between the Tag-It program and our asset monitoring that we offer through Perceptiv™ intelligence, we're saving them an average of an hour to two hours with downtime. And that added up really quickly. In a year we've saved them, documented, $2.5 million.

Carmen: Wow. That's like fall-off-your-chair big.

Caitlin: It was. I double checked my math, like, four times because it was a great number. They were really happy with it.

Carmen: Wow, that's amazing.

And I heard you mentioned you're also doing some monitoring with them, as well. That from what I understand, you can add on monitoring capabilities in addition to doing the tags.

Peter, I'm going to turn back to you. What can you tell us about the monitoring? Can you give us a little bit more detail about the monitoring capabilities?

Peter: Definitely. The Perceptiv Condition Monitoring offering, what it does -- it gives you real time analytics, 24/7 live data -- that with that data, you're able to set parameters that are acceptable within your given asset. And when that data gets outside of those parameters, it ultimately feeds either email alerts or text alerts back to you, so that you can ultimately get ahead of arising issues on your critical equipment.

What it does is it really gets you from a reactive mindset to a proactive mindset, which is ultimately what you want to get to, because the data behind it shows that when you get to that proactive mindset, the amount of unscheduled downtime decreases drastically.

Carmen: So the monitoring portion is really exciting. I really can see how that can help with predictive and preventative maintenance. Do we have a specific example of -- and thinking back to the shoe warehouse that Caitlin was just talking about -- have they come forward to let us know about how they've been able to already prevent some downtime thanks to having monitoring in place?

Peter: Yes, definitely. Not even within a week of us implementing one of our wireless nodes, on one of their larger horsepower motors, we were able to catch a fault. And we notified them of the data being outside of the parameters that we had set. They took a look at the motor, they realized that it was getting ready to fail. They were able to schedule the downtime for the next weekend when they had the time to address it. And ultimately was able to save them a significant amount of unplanned downtime. Which ultimately, we were able to factor into that $2.5 million dollars documented cost savings that they acknowledged.

Carmen: That's really cool. I mean, instead of its failing during production, they could plan it. And I'm sure they're really already starting to see, just with that instance alone, how this can help them moving forward. So that's really exciting to see that.

Chris, I'm going to turn to you now. Can you talk a little bit about how you can see all this information, whether it's on your phone or it's on your desktop -- you can see all the information that's tagged and recorded and being monitored. What details can you see?

Chris: Another great question, Carmen. The details that are provided in our new app are truly remarkable. Once you download the app, whether it's on your on your smart phone device and/or your desktop, you can actually see different assets that are scanned, where they're located in the facility. This all becomes readily available at your fingertips. Pictures of the assets for clarification really helps to identify what you're looking at when you need to look at it again. Order replacements -- when it comes time to order a new particular model for replacement, what that exact replacement is for a quick ordering process, and then specific additional information as to the condition of the asset, and then who to contact if you need additional help and support from an application engineering standpoint.

All of this is readily available. It's within the app, and it's a streamlined process once that's downloaded.

Carmen: It's really great you got all the information right at your fingertips.

I guess we could easily say that MRO is faster when you know what's there and what it's doing.

Peter: Absolutely.

Carmen: Well, that's all the time that we have for today. Caitlin, Chris, Peter, thank you so much for taking the time to be here today. I really appreciate it.

Caitlin: Thanks for having us.

Chris: Thanks Carmen.

Peter: Thank you Carmen.

Carmen: If you'd like to learn more or talk to a Perceptiv specialist about the new Tag-It program, we have a booking tool link that's right in the description of this podcast, and that will allow you to schedule 15 minutes with one of our Perceptiv specialists. You can talk about your specific business needs as well as see a demo on the Perceptiv Tag-It program.