Any business that operates within the manufacturing industry requires a great deal of maintenance to make sure their equipment can meet demands. Many businesses will split their maintenance approach between two fundamentally different practices. Those being preventive maintenance and a more resource-conservative approach in predictive maintenance. This post will serve to dissect the two approaches and how they can benefit and business in the manufacturing industry.
When people think of maintenance, their minds likely go to preventive maintenance, as it is the most common approach to maintaining the health of equipment. As is standard within the approach, routine maintenance is performed on equipment at predetermined intervals throughout the calendar year. Most times maintenance is scheduled based on equipment age, run-time and any other preexisting conditions. The more advanced alternative is much more resource efficient. Predictive maintenance has become the clear favorite in efficiency. These systems allow organizations to more accurately determine when equipment requires maintenance. Through interconnectivity with the Internet of Things, these systems are able to collect, interpret and analyze different performance data to indicate when a piece of equipment will require maintenance.
Finding a balance between what equipment requires which approach is the true challenge. Rather than having all of an operation’s equipment serviced at the same time, predictive maintenance uses data collected from the pieces of an operation’s equipment to signify when maintenance is necessary. As efficient as these systems are, they’re much more expensive to implement than what businesses would spend just defaulting to a 100% preventive maintenance approach.
The majority of doubt comes from how these systems operate. Through the interconnectivity of the IoT network, these systems provide the most accurate analysis when more and more equipment is connected to it. With more data to base these suggestions off of, these systems will become better equipped to predict unexpected downtime and read the signs that would lead to this failure and suggest the most optimal maintenance options that would mitigate these failures.
Even with these clear advantages, sometimes these systems are not as accessible to every manufacturing operation. With such high barriers to entry for these systems, many organizations will fail to ever implement them. Not to mention, highly sophisticated technology platforms that fully integrate into existing systems can be a challenge for employees. It often requires retraining existing personnel on newly established maintenance policies. This, coupled with the costs associated with these systems, can be difficult to manage. However, when these things are perfected, the systems are excellent.
If the information within this post wasn’t enough, consider taking a minute to view the infographic accompanying this post for more helpful breakdowns of these two approaches to maintenance. Courtesy of Industrial Service Solutions.