Maintenance efficiency – automated

Egger Ltd at Hexham, Northumberland, UK, manufactures chip board and associated products on highly automated production lines. The programs within numerous manufacturing systems and controllers are vital to the resulting OEE of the company and require frequent back up, version control and automatic administration. Egger standardised on Versiondog software from SolutionsPT to undertake and manage this task.

Versiondog in use by Egger at Hexham automates a great deal of maintenance tasks, such as recording changes and backup. Versiondog also provides a background infrastructure to the use of device programs to trouble shoot, implement continuous improvement and to simply stay in control. When there is a hardware failure all programs can be quickly restored, in the full confidence that they are the latest version. By its very nature Versiondog carries on working in the background, day in and day out; whilst it may not receive the visibility of OEE dashboards to senior management, the resulting KPI improvements will inevitably have a direct contribution from the company’s use of Versiondog. Egger has standardised its manufacturing technology across its entire operation, Versiondog being the solution for automation program version control. Versiondog has proved to be vital to the continuous operation of the plant as it automatically captures all changes made to networked controllers, and can be used manually to ‘log out’ a particular program, make changes, and then return it. This includes fully commented code which allows its use as a maintenance diagnosis tool to be much clearer and easier to work with.

• [Efficiency Improvement - Maintenance]
  The administrative procedures for checking out and checking in a program were easy and effective, and they had become part of the maintenance regime at the plant.

• Shortened MTTR (Mean Time To Repair) when unavoidable downtime does occur, resulting in direct and immediate beneficial effect on OEE KPI’s

• About 20 people on site at Hexham have access to, and regularly use, Versiondog.