Capital Equipment News April 2022

PREVENTATIVE MAINTENANCE

An SMT Ghana technician servicing a vehicle.

Volvo ActiveCare boosts uptime in Ghana mines Volvo Construction Equipment and dealer SMT Ghana have been piloting the Volvo ActiveCare 24/7 remote machine monitoring service in Africa to deliver new levels of uptime and productivity. Leonardo Aguiar, technical director at SMT Ghana, shares the inside track.

Preparing to deliver the service Delivering Volvo ActiveCare required some investment and organisation from SMT Ghana as a dealer, but it is worth it. The company appointed a CareTrack manager, Peter Antwi Boasiako, to work exclusively on driving the process. He is responsible for going to the CareTrack portal every day, checking the cases generated and following up on their resolution. He also receives alerts, campaign information, software update information and more from the Volvo Uptime Centre in Sweden. For service contracts where SMT Ghana has its own technicians based at the customer’s site, it will liaise directly with them to plan the interventions, so there is minimal communication with the customer. The customer is not necessarily even aware of everything happening behind the scenes; they just see the results of seamless servicing and high uptime. For other customers, its service managers will contact the customer when action is needed and ask if they would like SMT Ghana to send its technicians. It requires a mindset shift from these customers to appreciate how preventative and predictive maintenance will lower their costs long term. In these cases, it is extremely valuable for the dealer to be able to show the customer how much worse damage and costs they will have if they don’t stop the machine for servicing.

V olvo ActiveCare is a 24/7 remote machinery monitoring and fleet utilisation reporting service that takes the burden of monitoring CareTrack telematics data off the customer. SMT Ghana keeps a constant eye on machine utilisation, performance, and health on behalf of the customer to provide remote diagnosis, and suggests actions for improvement. This enables the dealer to catch any potential issues before they can turn into more serious and expensive problems, as well as boost uptime, productivity, and profitability overall. In a nutshell, ActiveCare makes life easier for the customer – and for the dealer to help them – and gives the customer peace of mind that they are getting the most out of their machines.

Ideal for customers in Ghana SMT Ghana has mining customers with machines working almost 24 hours a day, so uptime is crucial to their productivity and profitability. While the dealer’s on-site technicians do checks every morning for its service contract customers, a lot can happen in a day, and it is costly to the customer to stop machines to investigate every time an alarm or error code pops up. With remote monitoring and diagnosis, SMT Ghana can prioritise whether its technicians need to stop the machine immediately for servicing or can wait until the next scheduled downtime. The dealer can also anticipate any other problems that might occur, so its technicians can be ready with the tools and parts they need to take quick, proactive, preventative action at the next service.

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