KAM (KRONES Asset Management): Efficient care and maintenance management for our clients

Our clients’ paramount goals include avoiding unscheduled standstills and extending the useful lifetimes of the individual machines. For this purpose, KRONES supplies an intelligent care and maintenance system, providing the client with abundant options for optimising scheduled or also unscheduled standstills.

Companies have to be able to rely on their assets in the form of line components and machinery. Defects, malfunctions and standstill lead to lost production output, deteriorating staff motivation levels, and ultimately to adverse effects on overall line efficiency. For this reason, it’s essential to keep the machines operating at high performance. For the companies concerned, investments will pay off only if they involve systems that provide high availability and cost-efficient operation.

The challenge here lies in finding an optimum intermeshing of technical plant management and maintenance in terms of costs, scheduling and resource utilisation. The KAM package from KRONES creates transparency and provides an overview of maintenance intervals, control states and personnel availability, thus reducing costs and upgrading productivity.

Using the KAM care and maintenance tool

• increases the availability of the line concerned
• reduces the costs for maintenance and technical operations management
• upgrades the production figures
• creates flexibility, performative excellence and user-friendliness.

 KAM: what’s behind it?

Our clients can use KRONES Asset Management to update, monitor and document all the maintenance jobs required in the company. The system supports them in creating maintenance work orders with appropriate instructions and messages. If maintenance intervals are exceeded or a machine’s limit values are being violated, this will be indicated by an alarm or messaging function. With KRONES Asset Management, our clients can update, manage, price-check and order all the spares relevant to the maintenance work involved.

The aim is to avoid or at least minimise unscheduled line standstills by means of appropriate maintenance work. Time can be saved when planning recurrent maintenance routines, since the information involved has to be filed in the system only once. This can be triggered by different counter values (operating-hour, switching-cycles or calendar-related values). These can be acquired manually or filed automatically in KAM via an interface to a PDA system. In addition, there is an option for filing the estimated operating time per day, month, etc. as an assumption in the system.

In the case of machines from KRONES AG, KAM is preprogrammed with the appropriate data for preventive maintenance. The data supplied serve as basic information for maintenance work. Users can modify this information at any time to suit their own particular needs.

KAM is an open system. Information from any manufacturer can be integrated into the system. Additional components can be incorporated in the system by the client himself.

KAM HMI: maintenance management directly at the relevant location

Krones has taken fully on board the feedback from its clients and the expectations for the system formulated therein, and purposefully design-enhanced the classic KAM package. New features include support for the maintenance staff directly at the machine’s touch-screen.

In a role-based approach, the individual employee is shown only the inspection orders that lie in his/her own sphere of responsibility. Firstly, operating instructions for the machine involved, and secondly, the information required for the particular maintenance job in terms of the procedures concerned, spares, warning messages, etc. are displayed directly at the touch-screen. Operator interaction on the spot thus enables orders (time, personnel, material) to be processed and reported directly at the relevant location.

Furthermore, the idea of preventive care and maintenance management has been progressed to incorporate a situational approach, under which problems in the production line can be detected and documented on the spot. The messages proactively filed in the event of a problem can then be directly incorporated in the Maintenance Manager’s maintenance planning.

Advantages for our clients

Using KAM and KAM HMI ensures directly optimised cost-efficiency for the care and maintenance work involved. “Paper documentation” at the machine is consigned to history. Thanks to integration into the shop floor, the system enjoys high levels of acceptance among the operators.

The advantages for our clients lie in efficacious deployment of the maintenance personnel, minimised unscheduled standstills, increased line efficiency, and reduced TCO for the production line.