Experience in Motor and Equipment Repair and Maintenance

Proper management of Maintenance, Repair and Operations for any manufacturer can bring significant savings to any manufacturer’s budget. Of the estimated $100 billion spent by U.S. companies, about $10 billion to $12 billion is spent on MRO inventory that’s left on the shelf.

A recent study of 500 companies conducted by Grainger Consulting Services shows about half of U.S. businesses are doing a bad job of effectively managing MRO supplies. Their inventory shows plenty of repair parts on hand, but too often it’s too many of some parts and equipment, and not enough of critical items, causing shortages that bring production to a halt. So it’s not surprising that there are a number of vendors entering the market offering to handle MRO services for industrial and commercial companies.

But inventory isn’t the entire problem a manufacturer faces when attempting to manage MRO. It’s about scheduling preventive maintenance, tracking trends in periodic repair of equipment, and limiting down time in production cycles by not allowing your electric motors and equipment to “run to failure.”

The staff and engineers at On-Line Equipment Management, LLC, have spent more than 30 years in the equipment management industry. They developed their original program to assist HECO, Inc., a leading company in the Midwest for electric motor repair and replacement. The electric motor is an essential piece of equipment throughout the production process in any industrial plant. If an electric motor goes down, it’s not just the cost of replacement parts but the additional cost of downtime that the company has to endure.

 OLEM’s experience from the equipment side of MRO rather than as computer programmers new to motors and industrial equipment gave its engineers a unique perspective. It led them to develop TracRat, a web-based repairable asset management program for electric motors and other industrial production equipment. TracRat’s developers understood that the most efficient and effective way to control Maintenance Repair and Operations costs is to "anticipate, react and control.” If a manufacturer's MRO team only reacts and controls, the damage has been done – it’s too late to save money.

TracRat’s motor management software provides instant repair history, location history, failure analysis and average time between service needs of company’s entire motor population. The data tracks average trends but also the particulars of each piece of equipment, including maintenance schedules, warranty periods and failure analysis. The system is also available for suppliers to log in and access a company’s equipment repair history to discover the cause of an equipment failure. Suppliers can add in their information on repairs made so that the history of every electric motor or production equipment is covered by TracRat from “cradle-to-grave.”

As a result, major industrial companies such as General Motors, U.S. Steel, Pfizer and U.S. Gypsum have saved millions of dollars by using TracRat.

TracRat is an efficient tool that provides manufacturers the capability to comprehensively manage MRO by reducing inventory, cutting costs, reducing and even eliminating downtime, and increasing the efficiency of equipment repair and overall production.