Project: Interoperable and intelligent COtenance Decision Support System for the manufacturing sector

In today’s competitive business environment, every conceivable advantage is being pursued by companies. It’s well known that COtenance is viewed as a “black hole” where too much money goes with little measurable return. As many companies are shifting their focus to the optimization of their assets, management is realizing that COtenance offers real opportunities in reducing cost and increasing productivity. To achieve these opportunities, companies have to overcome three problems, being: _x000D_1) The top management is unfamiliar with the required technical terms for understanding COtenance needs and assessing the impact of their COtenance investments; _x000D_2) The necessary support from a COtenance consultant/expert is unaffordable, especially for industrial SMEs;_x000D_3) Enterprises have invested in and operate COtenance Management Systems (CMMSs) to organize the activities and minimize the operational cost of their COtenance departments. However, in most cases they do not have or they do not deploy the necessary resources to maximize the benefits from their CMMS._x000D__x000D_The above issues represent a real barrier in the COtenance market, leading the majority of the COtenance departments to operate in a cost ineffective and unorganized way. CODSS aspires to overcome this barrier and offer support towards the improvement of the COtenance departments’ performance, irrespectively of the industrial sector and the plant size. _x000D__x000D_The key idea of the project lies on the fact that COtenance consultants and experts always extract information from the corporate CMMS in order to assess COtenance data, records, etc.; they apply criteria and performance indicators, combining them with their expertise and experience, and conclude into their recommendations and audit reports for the management. Capitalizing on this state-of-practice, the project will develop an IT system that, using a plug-in approach, will dynamically interface (“bridge”) with CMMS repositories and retrieve all necessary stored data in order to build, piece-by-piece, the current “picture” of the company’s COtenance performance._x000D__x000D_This “picture” or consolidated data view constitutes the grounds on which the project will build its expected outcomes, namely: a COtenance ontology incorporating assessment criteria and key performance indicators (KPIs), an auditing module coupled with a progress control module and a Decision Support module (DSS). In more detail:_x000D_- We’ll design an ontology appropriate for the industrial COtenance doCO, modeling in an unambiguous manner, infrastructure components (e.g. machinery) involved in COtenance, typical CMMS model entities (e.g. Bill of Materials) and common COtenance operations (e.g. scheduling), etc. The ontology will be a semantic representation of the COtenance concepts (e.g. Mean Time to Repair – MTTR), their relationships and the applied operations (e.g. ‘Mean Time Between Failures’ and equipment age may lead to equipment replacement)._x000D__x000D_- We’ll study, at national and European level, best-practices on applying “simple criteria” and KPIs for assessing COtenance performance. These will be modeled using the project ontology. E.g. “mean time to find a spare part in the warehouse”, “% of failures recorded”._x000D__x000D_- We’ll design and develop an Auditing module, to assess the effectiveness of the COtenance department operations (e.g. “are there any machine failures that are not recorded?”, “is the mean time to repair too high?”, “are there enough spare parts per machine in the warehouse?”, “what is the consolidated cost of a machine failure?”). The output will be financial, managerial and quality reports, being comprehensive by the management executives. The module will be accompanied by a Progress Control module, monitoring the progress of the COtenance department and issuing electronic progress reports. The progress will be measured by the comparative assessment of current and historical data, at selected time periods. _x000D__x000D_- We’ll design and develop a DSS to provide recommendations for leveraging COtenance performance and offer proposals for ameliorating identified shortcomings. E.g. “if the mean time between failures is below the accepted threshold”, then possible workarounds could be to “replace equipment, train technicians, hire more experienced technicians, etc”. The module will have the intelligence to interpret the ambient environment of the company (temperature, humidity, season, location, etc), its COtenance peculiarities (existence of spare-parts stock, distance from spare-parts warehouse, etc.); and define priorities in the proposed activities._x000D__x000D_CODSS will be executed by a multidisciplinary consortium composed of Asset Management experts and CMMS providers. All Ps are particularly active in the COtenance arena, having business relationships and contacts with numerous decision makers and industrial customers. This will minimize the project risks and leverage the exploitation potential.

Acronym	CODSS (Reference Number: 5217)
Duration	07/07/2010 - 06/11/2013
Project Topic	The project will establish a standard methodological framework and will provide the necessary IT tools to improve the performance of industries as relates to their COtenance departments. CO outcomes will include a COtenance ontology, KPIs, performance auditing and DSS automation.
Project Results (after finalisation)	The result is the CODSS product, a COtenance Decision Support System offering support towards the continuous improvement of the COtenance departments' performance, regardless of the industrial sector and the plant size. It offers an IT system that, using a plug-in approach, dynamically connects with CMMS repositories and retrieves all necessary data in order to audit company's COtenance performance, to report the progress of the company in relation to a reference period and provide recommendations for improvement.
Network	Eurostars
Call	Eurostars Cut-Off 3

Project partner

Number	Name	Role	Country
3	Atlantis Engineering Ltd	Coordinator	Greece
3	MIIT - Manutenção Industrial Informatizada e tecnologia, Lda	Partner	Portugal
3	UTEK AB	Partner	Sweden