Next week I'm attending Fluke Reliability's Xcelerate 2025 conference, first as a speaker on Thought Leadership Day, March 18, and then as a panel moderator during the main conference, on March 20.
Last year at Xcelerate I met John Sedgwick, director of engineering and maintenance at Hexpol Compounding Americas, and wrote a story about how he tied corporate strategic plans to plant-level maintenance plans.
I write often about tools like MES, ERP modules or standalone IoT systems designed to measure machine uptime and increase OEE, but rarely do I deal with straight-up maintenance issues. My conversation with Sedgwick was the first time I'd run into a direct-line connection between top-level strategy and floor-level operations.
So I'll be looking for more of that at Xcelerate this year, reasons why awareness of the maintenance department serves the C-suite. If your maintenance folks are properly armed with the right technology, they can at the very least help serve Lean principles with lower parts inventories and minimize machine downtime, both of which have an effect on the bottom line.
—Dennis Scimeca, senior editor, technology
