Who we are

Geraldo Signorini, Founder and Practitioner, began in maintenance as an Operations Field Engineer for the drilling department of a big oil and gas service company. After spending a couple years in offshore rigs around the globe he moved to a Maintenance Engineer position to help fix the equipment that used to break in the field.

It did not take long for Geraldo to notice that operations and maintenance were not very aligned with its goals and vision. Even with all the struggle and hustle he fell in love with the challenge of preventing failures and make maintenance work more predictable. Geraldo has a bachelor in electrical engineering, and as a Maintenance Engineer, he decided to go back to school to pursue his master's in reliability engineering.

He had the chance to lead several projects as: design for reliability and maintainability, improving maintenance workflow efficiency, CMMS implementation, but the most interesting was related to defect identification algorithms and modeling. Continuing his studies and career, he founded Unikuaa and started developing a method to help other companies to overcome the problems he had experienced during his career and be prepared for the future.

The RISE Approach

RISE is a method to develop and implement your company's Reliability Strategy based on Physics of Failure prognostic. In other words, RISE will support the design of a cost-effective reliability and maintenance program focused on defect identification using an Artificial Intelligence modeling solution. RISE also covers the implementation of this tailor made R&M program which will help your company to move from reactive to a proactive maintenance and reliability culture.

According Emerson Electric Co. consulting division (https://partners.wsj.com/emerson/unlocking-performance/how-manufacturers-can-achieve-top-quartile-performance/), across the USA during the past decade, manufacturing facilities have spent an estimated sum of $50 billion annually in unexpected downtime. And part of this loss is due to the fact you need to perform a full forensics to determine what went wrong, so technical knowledge is not spent trying to avoid problems to happen but to figure out what happened, and this reactive behavior brings the maintenance efficiency down to around 20-30%.

There are two main pain points in this discussion, reliability and maintainability. There are two questions to be answered:

1. How can I avoid failures that can stop my line? The answer is to detect the defect signs before it becomes a failure that will stop your line.

2. How to make my recovery time smaller? And the answer is to know what to do when you are not running.

A survey carried by Cleaning and Maintenance Management Magazine (https://cmmonline.com/articles/fmsurvey2021 and https://www.statista.com/statistics/799977/share-of-operating-budget-spent-on-cleaning-or-maintenance-equipment-and-supplies/) from 2017 and 2020, with more than 500 different companies showed that 46% of them spent from 21-40% of their operating budget with maintenance, 35% spent 1-20% and 2.25% spent 80% or more.

The motivation to invest in R&M culture change is financially appealing, however there is much more around it when you compare how much Environmental, Safety and Health programs supported companies to move forward in terms of mindset and behavioral improvements. We believe Reliability as a core value can provide a step change to the manufacturing industry and Unikuaa will help you to be part of this movement.