CapEx investments are costly so should only be made when justified by business needs. Guidewheel helps you make these decisions by providing the data necessary to make a business case. First, Guidewheel helps you to reduce downtime so you can understand your true capacity so you see if additional machines are required to meet demand. You can also see which machines are most expensive to run, either due to energy inefficiency or high cost of ongoing maintenance, and determine if it’s cost-effective to replace them.
Key Guidewheel features:
Energy
 | Issues
| Pareto Analysis
|
Guidewheel Energy Calculations
How to use them:
Identify true capacity
Refer to “Identify downtime root causes” playbook for more information about how and where to tag in Guidewheel.
Have your team tag issues as they occur to capture downtime root causes.
Use Pareto Analysis to identify top causes of downtime and make a plan to address them.
When addressable causes of downtime have been addressed, you have an accurate view of current capacity.
If current or expected future demand is greater than current capacity, determine if additional CapEx is justified.
Identify under-performing machines
Review Pareto Analysis by issue and machine over the last day, week and month.
Identify machines with the highest downtime or the greatest number of issues impacting production.
Test fixes, like preventative maintenance, to get them back to standard performance.
If they continue to under-perform, calculate the cost of lost production vs. the cost of a new machine to determine if a replacement is justified.
Identify energy hogs
Navigate to Energy > Calculations
Select a date range. We recommend looking at the past week and month to see how energy consumption is trending over time.
If you’re running multiple machines of the same type, compare their energy consumption to identify best and worst performers.
Determine if differences in energy consumption can be explained by which SKU was being produced. For example, SKU 1 consumes more energy than SKU 2 so we’d expect machine 1 to consume more energy for that production run.
If this doesn’t explain the difference, calculate the cost of continuing to run that machine vs. replacing it to determine if a replacement is justified.