FAQ: Do you have any tools for selling the results of our program to our leadership?

James Newman

Yes!  There are a few ways Augury can support you in this effort:

1. Guidance on building a value narrative (see below)
2. Using the Augury platform to report on usage, machine health trends, success & impact, and faults detected
3. Augury’s website has a simple calculator for estimating the avoidance of costs that are commonly associated with unplanned production stops
4. Your customer success and reliability success managers have additional views of data that may help in developing your value narrative and can connect you with a dedicated customer value resource to consult and support you in building your success story

Oftentimes, managers are looking for a Return On Investment (ROI) calculation, which would compare the estimated net economic impact of the Augury solution to the price paid for it.  It’s an important calculation to determine whether the estimated benefit exceeds the cost, but even a great ROI multiple doesn’t guarantee renewal or expansion of your Augury deployment.  Better to think in terms of building a succinct value narrative that combines context, data (including ROI), and stories to show the impact of implementing Augury Machine Health.

Building a value narrative

1. Define the context:  
   1. What was the business problem that needed to be solved that led you to choose Augury?  
   2. How big was the problem in terms of the negative impacts it was having on the business, employees, and customers?
   3. How was Augury’s Machine Health solution expected to support your organization’s business objectives and priorities?
   4. How did you define what success would look like for the Augury program and how was that going to be measured?
2. What has changed since you adopted Augury Machine Health and what metrics and stories can you gather to show program impact?
   1. Is your organization using the Augury data and how?  Does your maintenance team respond in a timely manner to Augury alerts? (Use Augury platform’s Overview page to show the data!)
   2. Look for a couple of examples of valuable machine wins that reflect the impact of the Augury solution (use pictures when you have them)!
   3. What can you quantify in terms of costs avoided and actual costs reduced thanks to using Augury?
      1. Consider costs avoided directly related to unplanned production stops.  This calculator on Augury’s website may be helpful.  Total costs avoided for each machine win should be captured in the Augury platform so you have a single source of truth for reporting.  If you need support in completing this in the Augury platform, please contact your Augury Reliability Success Manager or Customer Success Manager.
      2. Consider process changes you have implemented that reduce costs over time and estimate the annual value of these changes.  Common examples include:
         • reducing total preventive maintenance costs based on condition monitoring data (this includes rework for PMs that were not completed properly, or created new problems)
         • reducing the time and costs of route monitoring
         • using Augury fault detections in Root Cause Analyses to change procedures and significantly reduce recurring problems such as bearing wear or misalignment
   4. Review factory data and KPIs with someone in your operations or finance team to identify metrics that should be influenced by successful adoption of Augury.  Causation is usually difficult to prove, but is there a correlation between adoption of Augury and:  improvements in the utilization or availability of the assets monitored by Augury, throughput, order completion rates, or other relevant metrics? 
   5. What do users of Augury at your company have to say about how their day-to-day work has changed since implementing Machine Health?  We’ve heard great stories from maintenance leaders and technicians about how adopting Augury reduced firefighting and chaos in their day-to-day work, and that using Augury has helped increase their skills and made their jobs safer by giving them adequate time to plan repairs.
   6. What role has Augury played in advancing data-driven decision making in your organization?
   7. What role has Augury played in driving cooperation between maintenance and operations in managing production scheduling?
   8. How does the use of Augury help you in recruiting maintenance employees in a tight labor market?  For example, how do prospective employees react when you tell them about using industry-leading IoT to help them succeed in their work and keep up with the demands of data-driven plants?
   9. How does using Augury help you ramp up new maintenance technicians who have not yet developed that 6th sense to identify when a machine has a problem? 

We'll be happy to dive deeper into this with you in the comments! Let us know your thoughts.

Scott Reed

Great summary! Another area of reliability impact is in spare parts stocking and inventory. Stock minimums and reorder points should be challenged as reliability improves, representing not only a real $ savings but also a risk reduction due to obsolescence or in some cases shelf life and special storage requirements.