In order for business owners and managers to be fully confident regarding the integrity of their equipment, they must first be willing to maintain it in such a way that it remains operating at full capacity. The ways in which they accomplish this are through maintenance, specifically two approaches: preventive and predictive maintenance.
A majority of organizations worldwide operate under the preventive maintenance strategy. This has long been considered the standard for maintenance as it is primarily driven by a calendar-oriented system. Meaning this approach has organizations conducting maintenance at determined time intervals throughout the year. These intervals are often determined by factors of each piece of equipment, such as age, the run time of the equipment and the cost of each checkup. While this approach is largely ineffective at minimizing resource output, it does keep equipment in top shape.
While preventive maintenance is effective, it isn’t efficient. Predictive maintenance, on the other hand, is far more efficient than its counterpart. With this approach, organizations take a proactive stance on maintenance, based on the tells of the system. This means that predictive maintenance approaches utilize the data collected on each piece of equipment through these systems to determine when maintenance is necessary. While efficiency is this system’s priority, the cost required to implement them into any operation is hard to justify.
Any business that believes their current maintenance strategy is lacking may consider a switch between preventive maintenance to predictive maintenance. For those businesses that are considering this, consult the infographic coupled with this post for some valuable information on how this transition would look. Through the detailing of the differences between these two strategies, in addition to the benefits of each, businesses may have an easier time deciding whether the decision is right for them. One thing is for sure, though, either strategy is better than failing to properly maintain your organization’s equipment.
Many hesitations surrounding these predictive maintenance strategies are the costs associated of implementing them into a manufacturing operation. Fortunately for businesses willing to invest, the actual implementation of said systems is becoming easier and easier. Seeing as though these technologies are connected to the Internet of Things network, the more of them that are implemented, the better these systems are able to perform over time. The collection, reporting and analysis provided by these systems improves as they collect more data. This data in turn grants organizations the ability to more accurately predict when their equipment will fail, and what maintenance is required in order to prevent or delay that failure.
While this post may make it seem as though predictive maintenance is the answer to all of your organization’s downfalls, this isn’t always the case. Sure, these systems are highly effective in anticipating unexpected equipment failure and downtime, but they won’t solve all of the issues of the organization that invests into them. Getting over the first major barrier of entry will only be met with additional challenges. For example, businesses must be capable of retraining their current employees to master these new systems, otherwise absolutely no value will ever be derived from them. It’s true that the benefits outweigh the challenges, but only if your business is capable of handling them.
As previously mentioned, the infographic included alongside this post can serve as a great resource for any organization currently considering how predictive maintenance systems would fit into their current operating structure. For more information on these two methods, take a moment and review the infographic courtesy of Industrial Service Solutions.
