uch is e-enabled maintenance worth? Consider chip making and the cost implications of downtime. By one estimate these facilities, which cost in the billions of dollars, are down 30% of the time. For all manufacturers, the average is said to be 10%, says Metcalf. When breakdowns do occur, Web-enabled equipment also allows OEMs to remotely monitor and repair their machines, reducing response time and travel expenses.2.3.1.3 Management tools While electronic management of manufacturing functions such as maintenance offers big cost and time savings, the greater strategic value may lie in the new options electronic information provides to executives. For example, collecting plant data centrally also facilitates the ability of managers to assign work based on which plant can deliver the quickest response time or the lowest cost of production at a particular point in time. Consider how you could improve the handling of the increasing turbulence in electrical utility rate structures, says Metcalf. By pushing data from circuit monitors and PLCs scattered across multiple plant sites to a central location, companies now can do a better job of assigning energy expenses to individual cost centers, analyzing energy usage trend data, and assigning orders to plants to take advantage of hourly fluctuations in utility rates. Metcalf cites the example of a major consumer products manufacturer that expects 10% to 15% annual energy savings viaWeb-enabled information gathering. A side benefit is the improved allocation of energy costs among individual process lines. Another Metcalf example is a major tier-one automotive supplier that is using the Internet to automatically collect and log all utility data-including water, air, gas, electricity, and steam-in a single integrated database. Data is collected in 15-minute intervals and automatically uploaded to a centralized data warehouse where it is manipulated and analyzed by the local utility as a value-add...
