PRE reads what your site already has — the PLC programs, the tags, the electrical schematics, years of maintenance records — and turns it into a reliability engineer that never forgets, never leaves the shift, and never loses the thread.
Every plant knows a machine stopped. What it doesn't have is why, in the four minutes when the answer is still cheap.
That answer sits with the technician who has run the line for fifteen years — on another shift, at another plant, or three years from retirement. Monitoring vendors sold you more numbers. Nobody sold you the context that makes a number mean something.
Four hours later the cause is a guess in a morning meeting. The stop is logged as “minor stoppage”. Next month it happens again.
Not a dashboard. The controller's own program and its own fault register — the two documents that define what “broken” means on this machine, written at commissioning and unread since.
FUNCTION_BLOCK FB 15
TITLE = STATION 05 PRESS-FIT NEST 2
NETWORK
TITLE = Check force window
U "IO/5"; // measurement good
SPB OK1;
O "NIO/5"; // measurement bad
U( ;
O "MAXF1/5"; // force F1 max
) ;
SPB HI;
L -16; // FORCE TOO LOW
T "SR-5C";
HI: L -18; // force too high
WE: U "5/FEHL"; // station fault
R "5/FREIG"; // reset release
SM145 : BOOL ; // force-travel St.3 not ready
SM146 : BOOL ; // force-travel St.3 bad n-times
SM153 : BOOL ; // St.3 value outside range
SM196 : BOOL ; // cylinder fault, fixture
SM236 : BOOL ; // spring-break control error
The loop runs without a person in it: detect, explain, act, verify, remember. Your people are in it to decide and to teach, not to fetch.
Detected, de-duplicated, attributed to a cause and closed — including the micro-stops nobody writes down. Availability stops being a number you report and becomes a number you can move.
Cycle time, quality and throughput held against a ceiling your own equipment has already demonstrated — not a nameplate figure from an OEM brochure.
Duplicates collapsed. Pattern recognised against seven weeks of this station’s own history.
Matched to the machine’s own fault register and manuals — SM146, station 3.
The controller logic had already routed the affected parts to the reject bin.
Ticket raised with the full evidence chain attached.
Every fault. Duplicates collapsed, alarm storms reduced to one event.
Cause and action, attached to the evidence chain that proves it.
Nightly: drift against a 14-day baseline, hidden downtime surfaced, patterns named.
What your people know, written down once and kept. It stops walking out of the gate.
A controller, a program, a fault register and a maintenance history. That's the whole prerequisite.
Mixed brownfield equipment, six vendors and three decades on one line — press, weld, assembly, test, pack. Availability first. Then the line's own best hour becomes its standard hour.
Six vendors and three decades of equipment on one line — the harder the archaeology, the bigger the edge.
Runs entirely inside the plant. Ingestion, storage, analytics and twins never leave the site.
Nothing is ripped out. Your SCADA, MES and CMMS stay exactly where they are.
Chillers, AHUs, lifts, pumps. Availability first, then the energy-and-comfort envelope at its best observed efficiency.
Availability first, then throughput per robot-hour, held at the fleet's best observed run.
Availability first, then yield and specific consumption at best case. Compressed air, water, cold chain.
The first weeks of PRE are an archaeology problem: programs, cabinets, undocumented panel edits, and the one technician who knows why station 5 is different. That work cannot be done over email.
So we put an engineer in your site on a defined stint, with defined terms — then leave the system running and the memory with you.
Programs, schematics, fault registers, maintenance records, tag list. Engineer on site. No production impact.
Every fault mapped to meaning and place. Hidden downtime surfaced — this is where the 277 hours show up.
Stops detected, attributed, ticketed and closed autonomously. First promise held.
Performance held to your demonstrated ceiling. Second line onboarded off the first one's templates.
Six weeks, one line, your own evidence. Worst case, you end up with a complete map of a line nobody has ever fully documented.