Using Experience to Improve Equipment Troubleshooting,

Diagnosis, Maintenance, and Repair

Repeat attempts to fix equipment problems are very costly: excessive down-time, unnecessary parts replacements, unresolved warranty claims and declining customer satisfaction are just a few of the consequences that result. Yet studies show that the root causes of many faults have been experienced before. The challenge is bringing past experience and current problems together. Typically, your most-experienced technicians are your best troubleshooters, because they have a wealth of past experience to draw on - but they are in short supply and they can't be every where at once or available 24 hours a day. SpotLight® can.

If you or your team need or want to

• troubleshoot more quickly and easily without missing anything important,
• improve equipment diagnosis and repair efficiency,
• link design engineering to field experience, and vice versa,
• access field experience to augment BIT, FIM and FMEA data,
  
• use the diagnostic experience of sub-system suppliers,
• reduce “no fault found” situations, improve first time fix rates,
  
• reduce inventory holding costs, and improve asset uptime;

CaseBank and SpotLight can help. SpotLight field service software has a perfect memory. It always remembers to ask the right questions to ensure that you don’t miss anything important. The symptoms you observe and enter are analyzed to review all possible causes, leaving nothing to chance. SpotLight supports the troubleshooting process by asking relevant questions, at the right time, and providing ranked possible solutions to symptoms. You reap the benefit of improved fault diagnosis and repair efficiency as a result of fewer unsuccessful repair attempts and a reduction in unnecessary part replacements.

Linking design experience with field experience (and vice versa) helps you get the biggest “bang for your buck” through

1. improved product reliability and repairability,
2. shorter product improvement cycles, and
   
3. a better customer experience with your product.

When designing complex equipment, engineers have to imagine and predict problems the equipment might experience in use. Based on these predictions, they produce tools - called prognostics - to detect the symptoms of anticipated failures. They also design on-board self-test capabilities to detect failures when they do happen, and they produce troubleshooting guides to help technicians determine what caused those failures.

SpotLight adds a "real-world" dimension to the documentation and systems provided by the manufacturer for a more effective diagnostic troubleshooting process.

Leveraging Real Experience

Leveraging the Experience of Subsystem Suppliers
CaseBank offers its services as a non-competing "knowledge broker" to industry. Because we support manufacturers of both equipment and their major systems, like motors and engines, we are in a unique position to ensure that troubleshooting knowledge can be shared effectively with proper confidentiality.
We are also uniquely positioned to help our customers share the appropriate contents of their SpotLight knowledgebases, and several of our customers have already decided this is the direction to go.

Reduce “no fault found” situations

From symptoms experienced, SpotLight will request test results, and guide troubleshooters to find the root cause of experienced problems. Through the intelligent interview process, SpotLight ensures that nothing slips through the cracks, and faults are solved through root cause analysis. In a similar vein, finding the appropriate fault, the first time, leads to reduced inventory carrying costs through reduced improper part replacement. Solving problems quickly and accurately leads to improved asset uptime – at reduced costs.

Contact us for more information about how SpotLight can help your organization use real world experience to improve equipment diagnosis, troubleshooting, maintenance and repair.