Technology has driven manufacturing advancements from the earliest tools to modern automation. Today, operational technology (OT) integrates hardware and software to optimize machinery, production lines, and plant infrastructure.
OT spans multiple plant functions, and ServiceNow’s Now Platform delivers real-time visibility, device tracking, and workflow automation to reduce downtime and optimize operations.
Your takeaway? When operations work in concert, great things happen.
“Manufacturing operations is like a ballet, where you have plant management, maintenance, production, quality control, engineering, and health and safety. You have all these different leaders executing on their function while also all working in tandem just like a ballet to output an amazing final product,” said Dean Stavrou, Global Head of Industrials Engineering, CoreX.
To understand what this looks like in action, let’s examine an office furniture manufacturing facility. This plant is involved in everything from making furniture to shipping from the site and managing dealer interactions and ServiceNow integrates every operational element.
With ServiceNow, the plant minimizes unplanned disruptions, monitors equipment health, and anticipates failures through proactive maintenance. The platform allows the team to invest in proactive maintenance and gain visibility into all the plant’s devices to easily break down the facility by areas using the asset management function to understand the investment in parts and maintenance.
The mobile-enabled platform also allows the team to get on the production floor for tracking and logging on a phone or tablet, a substantial update from the previous method of carrying around a clipboard, making written notes, and having to get back to the maintenance office to manually log everything into a desktop.
The entire maintenance operation is streamlined by ServiceNow’s AI and predictive capabilities.
The key benefit in quality is reduced defects due to proactive corrective actions and reduced costs related to defect resolution. ServiceNow incorporates the plant’s quality tools into a machining center database correlating quality issues with root causes in specific technologies or engineering with data from the manufacturing floor and reporting.
To enable continuous improvement, ServiceNow logs quality defects and uses AI to flag critical incidents that require immediate attention.
Turning data into actionable information and providing visibility across the plant makes ServiceNow an essential partner for the engineering manager. Data about connected assets in the facility help with creating capital proposals that go beyond guesswork and point to actual value. This ability quantifies and connects the value of investing in the factory with the value in day-to-day operations.
Automation and AI in event management and tracking incidents is a game-changer on the floor. The data and visibility in ServiceNow is a similar game-changer in equipment management from creating equipment specs to keeping track of spare parts and ensuring equipment is patched on schedule.
ServiceNow’s impact on health and safety includes centralizing knowledge management to help retain institutional knowledge about plant operations for troubleshooting and best practices. Where it stands out is coordinating with other functions like engineering and maintenance to quickly uncover and resolve potential safety issues.
For example, faulty firmware in a safety laser scanner prevented proper detection under certain lighting conditions, causing hazardous equipment to remain operational.
After figuring out the problem was the firmware of that scanner model, and not just a defective unit, using the OT device inventory in ServiceNow it was possible to find every iteration of that firmware across the entire enterprise and initiate an immediate remediation campaign. What stood out was that the entire campaign took around 30 days when an effort predating ServiceNow required much more manual effort and required eight months to complete.
There may not be an official term for it, but plant managers juggle multiple priorities, including:
It’s a tall order to balance this disparate group of priorities and the unifying factor is the ServiceNow platform touching everything from quality and maintenance to engineering health and safety coordinating data, automation, predictive capabilities, and AI.
To learn more about how ServiceNow goes beyond IT to enhance facility functions from the plant floor to the front office, book a CoreX virtual plant tour today.