Alerts notify the right people on your team of issues with your machines so they take action to address them before they impact production. You can set up alerts for many different conditions like long idle times, a spike in current draw, or a machine going down, to prevent issues from impacting production.
This article will help you set up alerts, determine what events you want to be alerted about, who should be notified, and how and when alerts should be escalated to additional team members.
Who should set up your alerts?
Anyone with an admin profile in Guidewheel
Before reading this article, we recommend you check out:
Alerts can be triggered by the following events:
Down: A machine goes down for a specified length of time. The machine is offline and idle. It will catch changeovers and setting up (idling) and being powered down (offline).
Idle: A machine is idle for a specified length of time. It will catch changeovers and setting up (idling) but it will not include the times when it is off (offline).
Offline: A machine goes offline for a specified length of time
Overloaded: A machine draws more power than expected, indicating it could be overloaded.
Custom: A set of metrics and parameters customized to your goals. For example, create an alert for when the power consumption goes outside of desired range.
When an Alert is triggered, an Issue is automatically created in Guidewheel. The Issue captures start time and end time, allows users to tag the issue with the underlying root cause(s), and add notes about actions they take to resolve the issue.
What alerts should you set up?
Unplanned downtime alerts
1. To get started, we recommend triggering alerts for when a machine has been “down” for 5 minutes, which will notify specific team members and create a new Issue. This can be a good starting point to get a pulse on how frequently your machines are down for longer than 5 minutes. You may wish to adjust the timing to better suit your operations in the future.
2. Define an escalation path to engage others on the team and/or notify management of any issues that persist beyond a defined time period.
Teams typically set up escalation paths in the following way:
First recipient | Operator / Technician |
Second recipient | Supervisor |
Third recipient | Lead / Manager |
3. Capture steps taken to fix the issue by responding to the Alert SMS or email (responses to Alerts are saved as comments on the Issue) or adding comments directly to the Issue in Guidewheel.
Unplanned downtime will typically be for:
No operator
No material
Missing tooling
Unplanned Maintenance
Start with a few of your critical machines, then add alerts to other machines as your team gets more comfortable with receiving alerts and taking actions to resolve the issues.
For more information on how to decide on who should receive alerts, click here.
Questions? Email [email protected].