Background
Palziv is an international manufacturer of cross-linked, closed-cell polyethylene foams, providing R&D and production solutions with complete logistics support and customer service to markets in North America, Europe, and Asia. Experienced engineers and technicians are responsible for the maintenance activities and failures’ troubleshooting in the Palziv’s manufacturing sites.
The Challenges
Here are the main challenges Palziv’s teams have pointed:
Too often failures’ repair process is inefficient, involves a lot of trial and error, rarely includes proper knowledge sharing, which ends up in long downtimes, materials waste, and poor quality that can kill the bottom line.
Several experienced engineers and technicians are going to retire and leave the company in the coming years. The knowledge and “know-how” that they keep “in their heads” is huge, and there is a high risk that important knowledge will be lost with them.
Technical information such as electrical schemas, maintenance manuals, maintenance procedures, spare parts data, and such, are spread in various locations and systems. When a technical member needs them while working on his/ her tasks, this information is not so accessible, or getting it is time-consuming.
The Solution
Kiami’s FastTtroubleshoot was optimized to provide a remarkable solution for all the challenges above, and much more. The system is literally transforming the way technical and operation teams repair failures and collaborate knowledge, experience, and best practices, across sites and the entire supply chain.
When a manufacturing engineer, technician, or line operator tackles a failure, the system scans the knowledgebase for similar failures, and provides diagnostic and repair recommendations, that have been optimized by an optimization algorithm, to minimize repair time and spare parts costs.
All the accumulated experience lies there. Making it so users do not need to “reinvent the wheel”, each time they tackle something slightly new. All the necessary technical information such as diagrams, procedures, manuals, photos, and videos can be opened with one click.
In more complex failures, where decision trees can simplify the diagnostics process, the user can run the Expert Wizard, and follow its guideline. The user can key in symptoms, error codes, or other process characteristics, and the system generates recommendations based on that input. Integrating the expert system into the knowledge base has proven to be a game-changer, cutting repair times and waste dramatically.
A powerful analytics tool helps to highlight process trends, products’ weaknesses, or other anomalies that require intervention, monitoring, preventative, or improvement actions.
The Benefits
The system was implemented in 2019, showing a tremendous impact on the maintenance engineers' and technicians’ daily work.
According to Elon Shaked, Palziv’s maintenance manager,
“Since FastTroubleshoot was implemented, it is much easier to fix failures. Failures’ repairs do not tend to complicate any more, and the repair time is usually shorter. The implementation process was a wonderful process that made our team more professional and much more collaborative.”
Here are the main benefits that have been observed:
Faster and more efficient failures’ troubleshooting process thus cutting downtimes, materials waste, poor-quality and returning failures.
Highly effective technical knowledge and best-practices collaboration among the technical team members, thus preserving experienced employees’ “know-how” before leaving the company.
Shorter and more effective new employees’ training and qualification process.
Improved team members’ professionalism.