Oracle Maintenance Cloud has been successfully deployed by asset-intensive companies around the world. Oracle Maintenance Cloud is the most comprehensive and integrated solution for asset management that is available in the cloud. This session addresses the benefits available to maintenance organizations. Get an update on current capabilities, the future Oracle Maintenance Cloud roadmap and hear a maintenance organization success story.

Presented by Andy Binsley, Oracle

Duration: 35:47

Read the full video transcript below:

Tomorrow’s Maintenance Today

Hi everyone. My name is Taryn with Quest and thank you for joining us today. Today’s webinar is Tomorrow’s Maintenance Today and our presenter is Andy Binsley. So a few housekeeping notes before we get started. All attendee lines will be muted during this presentation. Please feel free to submit any questions at any time in the question dropdown box located on your Goto Webinar panel and we will leave some time at the end to answer any questions that you all have in this session is being recorded and will be uploaded to the Quest content library and we will send everyone a notification when the recording is available for download. So at this time I will turn it over to Andy who will kick things off for us.

Hello. Thanks for joining. This is Andy Binsley. I’m with Oracle and I’m responsible for product strategy for our Maintenance Cloud product, which will be the topic of today’s session. Also responsible for manufacturing and cost management which are related and similar products. Presentation that I’ll go through today has a few sections. I’ll start with some thoughts on sort of the future of maintenance practices and systems. I’ll introduce Oracle Maintenance Cloud. Mention a few of our live customers. I’ll show you a quick tour demo that is available online. I’ll show you how to find that. And then I will talk briefly about our development roadmap and hopefully at the end we’ll have time for any questions. So let’s get started.

Thoughts on The Future of Maintenance Practice and Systems

So some thoughts on the future of maintenance. You know, there’s lots of people that talk about what’s going on in the world and industry. So I just selected a few topics that I think are interesting and maybe relevant to maintenance.

One I think is that we’re moving towards a world where people are, less necessary or less a part of routine operations. There’s more automation of things. Machines are more reliable and you know, we’re starting to see factories that run lights out except when somebody needs to go in to adjust or to repair something.

Younger Workforce

That I think is an important trend to be thinking about. The younger workforce. I’m a member of the baby boom generation has spent most of my career aging with everyone around me. And then the last few years we’ve seen a dramatic change as baby boomers start retiring, the workforce is starting to get younger and, it seems like every year the workforce gets a little younger and that has a number of implications. One is you have a lower level of experience in terms of tribal knowledge in a maintenance organization. The other thing is you have people in the millennial generation that have grown up with computers and the post millennial generation that’s coming quickly grew up with a smartphone in their hand. And those experiences are very different from the baby boomers who watched computers start to be used. And it makes a dramatic difference in what expectations of systems are and how people expect to use them.

Robots

Robots I think are something that some coming and we’re going to see a lot more automation of machines themselves. But I think we’re moving to a point where we may see automation of maintenance tasks. We’re starting to see things where routine procedures could be done by a machine. So we’ll see. I think we’ll see more of that. I could envision a world where maybe, the job of a maintenance person is to go out and inspect, make a decision, and then set up a machine in place to perform the work. So we may get there. There’s a lot of different kinds of robots and I thought I would pause here and show a video that I think highlights how rapidly robots are becoming capable in terms of interpreting things on the fly and reacting and responding. That’s the middle video here.

These links will be in the presentation for you to download. I won’t show the first video, but I do want to recommend first link. It’s a 12 minute video that shows a variety of robots in all different applications, which was just very informative. The one that stuck in my mind was the Da Vinci surgical robot excising a piece of grape skin, removing it and then reattaching it, then stitching it. Just, you know, the automation and the small controller. It was just amazing. Yeah. So let’s take a quick look at this one video.

So that video was a robot doing parkour which I had to look up, some of you and your younger may know that, but it’s a current trend in fitness, sort of urban obstacle courses and what you saw there was the robot reacting to irregular patterns on the fly and you know, taking the appropriate action. So I just think, you know, in another six months, you know, we do this again, we’ll have an even more incredible video to watch. I do want to show a cautionary video. I think that you can overdo automation like this as an example of too much automation.

Smarter Machines

I think in a world where we all get mesmerized by our phones and devices. I think this just sort of an interesting example of how there’s a limit to what maybe automation should be applied to. So let’s go back to the presentation. So again, I encourage you to watch that 12 minute video. If you have the opportunity. Smarter machines, I think that machines are getting smarter to the point where they self diagnose. We’re starting to see self healing machines. I think that that will change the nature of maintenance dramatically. It may be that it’s more about doing the things that a robot can’t do unless about troubleshooting, less about routine maintenance and more about handling the unusual, the problem solving kinds of things. And in that regard, I think there’s an interesting question of will we all need to become data scientists or at least more like data scientists in our daily jobs.

This was something I found describe trying to describe a data scientist and you know, it describes him as someone with technical and business skills and the technical skills help you with the analysis side of things. I think the business skills are important because I think communication and collaboration will become even more important. Particularly skills, you know, working remotely. You know, we see more and more machines being monitored remotely, problem solving skills of course. And I think perhaps most important curiosity and intuition. Just, you know, figuring out the things that the systems can’t figure out for themselves and sometimes that requires this sort of a out of the box thought process. So some just closing thoughts on maintenance systems in the future, I think they have to be more intuitive, easier to use. That’s key in our development strategy. There’s going to be a lot more direct machine integration.

We’re working on improving our ability to integrate inbound and outbound with machines and we think that our system because of the integration may become more of a query and analysis tool and less of an execution tool to move forward. And related to that, I think that machine learning and artificial intelligence have the opportunity to make recommendations and predictions to help us figure things out and decide things. A simple example of something that we’re working on right now is using machine learning to study the failure patterns of machines that have preventive maintenance programs. Analyze that and make a recommendation for perhaps lengthening or shortening the maintenance intervals so that you can optimize maintenance based on detailed analysis of what’s been happening. I think final point on trends, you know, technology’s enabling so many things in the future. I think it’s going to be critical to deploy your software in the cloud.

Why Software Must Be In The Cloud

Deploying in the cloud lets you take innovations quickly. And I think again another slide to sort of speak to that. When you’ve traditionally buy software and install it on premise the thing that happens is you don’t update it for three to five years. If you’re an aggressive company and sometimes we see people running 10, 15 year old software, I ran into a company two weeks ago that’s still running mainframe software from 30 years ago. And they are obviously not taking advantage of innovation. When you buy and install a smart phone app, you get updates regularly, sometimes daily and the app improves incrementally and gives you more value. And that’s exactly what happens from the cloud. Your software is updated and improved regularly and even better than a phone. You don’t have to worry about the hardware. So we’ll talk a little bit more about cloud in a few minutes.

Oracle Maintenance Cloud

But I think the most important point is cloud software grows more valuable over time, whereas on premise software becomes less valuable until your next upgrade, when it’s a costly upgrade and then it becomes more valuable and starts depreciating from that point again. Okay. Articles, maintenance, cloud. So we’ll talk just a little bit about that, we position Oracle Maintenance Cloud as part of a integrated supply chain cloud product line and that’s because traditionally and maintenance, it’s so important to have integration to inventory and procurement and other supply chain tools. So maintenance is a part of our complete supply chain solution, which is supporting these five business flows, sort of a product life cycle at the top. Source to settle is the sales process. If you’re a product company it’s a procurement process. Order to cash is the sales process. Plan to produce would be the manufacturing process.

And then maintained to optimize would be the process of caring for your assets. And that’s where we fit into the supply chain. And then as an integrated suite, we overlay this with standard product and quality tools, standard inventory tools, standard internet of things capabilities, and then standardized costing and financial capabilities. So this complete integrated suite is a really important part of our strategy. Often people in the maintenance world will look to, “Well, I want the best standalone maintenance system in the world.” And the problem with that is you can’t run a maintenance system without parts. So that means you need inventory. You can’t manage inventory without a real strong item management system. You can’t get things into inventory without a strong procurement system. And if you’re a private or a public company, you have to properly cost and account and report on things.

Maintenance Cloud Benefits

So you really need a complete integrated solution. So Maintenance Cloud in particular, a few points on that. A legacy on premise system just isn’t going to get you where you need to be in the future. Typically they’re customized heavily and as I before they decrease in value. A cloud system grows in value, transforms and changes with technology and your needs. A maintenance system historically helps you manage costs, promote sustainability, manage knowledge, and manage risk and ensure safety. So our maintenance system is an important part of supporting a professional maintenance operation.

Comprehensive Support For Maintenance

Maintenance Cloud includes basic core capabilities you would expect on a maintenance system, definition of assets, work orders to manage and execute work, inventory to supply the materials to perform work and then cost management engine to cost and analyze the work and then properly account for it.

Maintenance Cloud Vision

The system also includes capabilities to perform a variety of maintenance strategies. Everybody does some degree of reactive maintenance. Historically people do more reactive than any sort of preventive, predictive and prescriptive maintenance. But what we see with the improvements in technology, people are moving up this curve. And I think being in a cloud platform will help companies move up this curve as machines integrate more and support the preventative maintenance and predictive maintenance and the prescriptive maintenance and get us out of just a pure reactive kind of world.

IoT Enabled Supply Chain

In that vein integrate tightly with our IoT cloud products, which are intended to connect software with devices, collect our cloud applications.

And we at the bottom of the screen sort of divide it into five categories. We monitor assets from a maintenance perspective. We monitor our assets from a production perspective, mobile assets we monitor from a fleet perspective, which has a little more geographic notion to it. And we monitor workers to ensure their safety and help manage what they’re doing more effectively. And then for product companies that sell and service their products, would we monitor products that are sold from a service, aftermarket service perspective.

Oracle Maintenance Cloud Customers

I’m gonna show you a slide on one customer, but I’ll mention that we have a number of live customers in a variety of industries. We have a fleet customer maintain buses. We have a oil and gas industry customer maintaining a natural gas plant. We have a customer managing retail stores and the customers that I want to highlight today is Wonderful Citrus.

Wonderful Citrus

Wonderful you may know from halos, mandarins that are now in season and they’re advertising quite a bit on TV right now if any of you watch TV. But they selected the Maintenance Cloud solution as part of the complete Oracle Cloud solution to transform their business. They were facing a costly upgrade of their on premise software, which happened to be, Oracle. They decided to move to the cloud.

So we’ve brought up their citrus division, which includes six plants that are maintained with Maintenance Cloud and they’ll be rolling the software out to the juice business, which includes Pom Wonderful, which some of you may see in the marketplace. And then they’ll roll out to their farming business of, you know, growing fruits and nuts to support their consumer products. So a great example of a customer. One of the things that’s very interesting with them is they have a lot of high speed automated production equipment. That equipment is integrated into our cloud software and is actually sending us production reporting transactions at the rate of about one per second right now. So very high volume, very integrated implementation.

Oracle Maintenance Cloud Quick Tour Demo

Okay, let’s switch gears a little bit here and I’ll show you a quick tour demo of our software. What I want to share with you is this is something that’s available to everyone. You can find this on cloud.oracle.com. That’s a great source of information for anything about cloud products. To find the demonstration that I’m going to show you can click on applications. This lists all of our applications. I’ll select maintenance and that brings me to a page that has the quick tour, what I’m going to launch in a minute. And it also has a lot of information on features, pricing. Learn more is a key link to drill down into all kinds of information about new features, training videos. Just a great resource for anybody who’s interested in cloud applications and you can get this for all of the application products. So I’ve already loaded this up.

This is a demonstration of a user going through the software. When you sign in, you come to a basic menu page where you select the application that you’re going to run. So here’s maintenance. I select maintenance. You come to a landing page that has some embedded analytics. These are actually analytics designed to help you navigate and find issue, finding and go directly to issues that you need to deal with. So I might have, you know, high priority work orders or past due work orders. I just click on that link. It takes me to them. I can analyze scheduled versus unscheduled work completions and so on a bad actor assets as measured by work orders. So a lot of useful information available the moment you sign in. When you take a look at work orders, we have just basic screens for searching and accessing them throughout the system so that you don’t have to drill down.

We have these little orange icons. If you click on them, you get can mouse over them and just get additional information about the object that they’re, so this is some asset information related to the work order that’s been selected in the screen behind. When you open up a work order, it has the kinds of things you’d expect in a work order, header information, operation, the task information and then history. So that’s been delivered bia tabs. There’s buttons to access other things like you can go to view cost, you can access the social network. If you drill down into a work order, we get down to managing the detail of each operation. You know, what’s the work required, what department or work center is going to perform work and the basic controls for that. And then that gets delivered to a technician via what we call the dispatch list.

And the dispatch list shows for technician, just the list of jobs in the sequence that they’d sorted and things they need to work on next. If you want to for completion of work, it’s as simple as selecting and pressing quick complete and that will complete the work and allow the technician to move on. If there’s something unique about this job, requires additional data capture, notes, collect an image or something you can complete details and go to a screen that will answer them, collect a little bit more more details. So here’s collecting more details. This would be where you can, if you wanted to make some notes and attach things for this work. We have, of course, a printed work order available if you need that. These come as standard templates that then are often modified by the customer to do things like put your logo in instead of our logo.

Some other features of maintenance system. This is interacting with the Oracle social network to discuss a work order. Social Network lets you communicate via simple text messages essentially. But what’s important about this is these are tagged and tied to the object that’s the subject of the discussion. So they become part of the history of a work order in this case. Some other things to take a look at. This is a look at assets. So yeah, and I have a search and lists of assets that I can query up. I can create a new asset. We try to make our creation screens as simple as possible so that you can create a new asset and just filling in a few pieces of information. In this case, the asterisks indicate what’s required. In this case you can create an asset with two pieces of data or you can copy from another asset and create it quickly that way as well. So this is just creating it.

This is copying it. We can also import assets. Certainly when you implement software you need to load in your existing data. We have imports available to do that. Basically file based endpoints. This shows you for planning work. So if I’m planning work for a particular work order or standard jobs for use on work orders, this is how we define the steps to perform work, which are in this case two steps, pump inspection and change the pump belt. And then below each step we see a list of resources and parts that are required to perform this work. And then this becomes a template that is copied to work orders so it can be reuse. So just showing the details of the second operation on the right you can search for parts and drag them and drop them onto the operation to add them to a particular task.

And again, we can import work orders in the same way that we can import assets. We also have rest web services available for bringing in data and creating records. So if you have a machine that can send you an error message and request work, it can come in through a rest service to create a work order to perform work. This is actually how we integrate the IoT cloud products so that if a machine has an error code we can create a work order automatically. We keep history on our work orders. So I can select a work order and view it’s historyr. We can automate things like mass close of work orders. So many of the tasks you’d expect. We can send information to costing and then view costs and summary or a detailed views. And that’s a quick look at the Maintenance Cloud product. You can get more information, and again, as I said, this started from the cloud.oracle.com website.

Maintenance Cloud Development Roadmap

So let’s go back to the presentation. Just a couple more things I’ll share are a little bit about our development road map. People on the cloud products are relatively new in the cloud. So you know, one of the benefits of the cloud is rapid addition of functionality.

Maintenance Cloud Updates

We developed in the cloud on a quarterly cycle. So every customer takes quarterly updates. Customers take those updates during the same month, each quarter. So if you’re in the second month of the calendar, quarter in February, you’ll follow in May, August and November through the year. And that cycle repeats. So customers get routine updates, which include new features and those new features are delivered with a technique we call op in. If you don’t op in, software works the same as it did before the update.

This makes it easy to take updates quickly without disrupting your business. But if you opt in, then you take advantage of the new new feature capability. But you have, you know, you can do that opt in at your leisure. And then I think an important point in the cloud is that quarterly updates are like monthly or quarterly financial closes. There’s something that you plan for, they have on the repetitively. So you plan your business cycle around the new budget resources and time to support them.

Oracle Applications: Current Release & Roadmap

So this shows a lot of detail on our roadmap. I’ll just point out that the columns are current release. These are features that we’ve added in the most recent update, the next column is features that will be added in the next 12 months over the next four update cycles and then future things that we’ll be working on beyond the next 12 months. This will be included in the presentation. I’ll just simply point out that in the next column we’re expanding our ability to integrate and extend the capabilities. So some technology improvements, we’re doing a lot of customer enhancements as customers go live. We give us a lot of great feedback and then there’s a lot of other features in there related to procurement and other capabilities. And then Internet of Things is certainly something we continue to invest in.

So before we go to Q&A, just a couple things to share. We have an event in March in Las Vegas that we call them the Modern Business Experience. This grew out of an event we started 15 years ago called the Maintenance Summit and it grew to a larger and larger events to the point that now it’s an event for all of Oracle Cloud applications. It’s the most important event of the year for those interested in our cloud products in particular Maintenance Cloud, we’ll have, this event is primarily customer speakers sharing their experience and as I said, it will cover maintenance, all of the other supply chain products like procurement and inventory and financial products, human capital management as well. So a really good event to go to. And I encourage you to register and come see us there. And then finally just for more information on the product or any questions you may have after tonight, cloud.oracle.com that I showed you is a great resource, and my email is there if you would like to email me with any questions.

Q & A

So I think at this point we can see if anybody has any questions on the chat.

Taryn:
Hi, thank you so much Andy. And right now we do not have any questions. So if anyone does have questions, now is the time to send those in on your question dropdown box in the Goto webinar panel. So while we wait for some people to type in some questions, do you have any closing thoughts you want to leave everybody with today?

Andy Binsely:
I think the thing to be considering is moving to the cloud. I just think that that is so important to get to a world where your applications become more valuable every quarter as you get new capabilities. Traditional software has been something that you install and then you fall behind. I think the cloud really changes that dynamic and it was really important them moving forward.

Taryn:
Okay. Thank you so much. And we do have a question that came in. So the question is, what’s the best way to handle collaboration of tools and the Cloud Maintenance application?

Andy Binsely:
I think that the most common way is to treat tools as an inventory item that can be issued and returned. That’s the most common way I’ve seen tools managed. Tools should also be defined as assets so that they can have appropriate preventive maintenance or calibration processes scheduled for them. So I think, you know, defining tools, those assets, moving them in and out inventory is the best technique that I’ve seen used to manage them effectively.

Taryn:
Okay. And that is all the questions that we had come in. So thank you again, Andy for coming and speaking with us today. And I do want to make a quick announcement. We do have Quest Experience Week that is coming up soon. It’s coming December 4th, 5th, and the 6th. So be sure to go on and register. We have a lot of great content that will be shown and talked about that week. So for more information on that, go to QuestOraclecommunity.org/QXW for more information. So thanks again Andy, and thanks again to everyone that attended today’s Webinar. So thank you.