This is an old story. A story of one of the first users of CWorks in Malaysia.

Proton is the name given to Malaysia’s national car. An abbreviation of Perusahaan Otomobil Nasional or National Automobile Industry.

Proton was not only THE Malaysian automotive maker at the time but was also tasked to develop the local automotive industry. Over the years, it has produced many iconic automotive and brands.

As the initiator of the local automotive industry, Proton was also tasked to develop the first made in Malaysia automotive engine to reduce dependency on foreign made engines.

They then developed the CamPro engine which was produced at a plant located in the Proton manufacturing complex in Shah Alam, Malaysia. The CamPro plant realized that apart from manufacturing the CamPro engine, they also have to ensure that the plant maintenance is done smoothly.

This maintenance included ensuring preventive maintenance was done. The maintenance practices follow the lean manufacturing or total productive maintenance concept that was practiced by Japanese automotive manufacturers because Proton was also a result of Malaysia’s “Look East” policy.

In order to reduce breakdowns, Proton consistently do root cause analysis of all breakdowns using the why-why analysis methodology promoted by total productive maintenance.

In why-why analysis, each failure root cause are discovered by asking a series of why questions. Usually, after 3 to 5 whys, the root cause will be identified.

However, after doing the analysis for some time, the CamPro plant discovered that their filing cabinets were full of these reports. Due to the reports being filed on paper, there were no corrective actions actually implemented. It was a classic example of “out of sight, out of mind”.

To resolve this issue, the CamPro plant decided to look into a computerized maintenance management system that was interactive and searchable to record maintenance work and analysis.

They found CWorks, a Malaysian provider of computerized maintenance management systems. After many discussions, CWorks was brought on board and tasked with customizing their maintenance management system to cater to why-why analysis recording.

With CWorks, the plant was able to action on their why-why analysis which was in “out of sight, out of mind” mode.

This deployment was remarkably done in the early 2000s when total productive maintenance or lean maintenance was still an Asian phenomenon and computer systems were still heavily of the client-server variety.