Organizations that rely on their manufacturing processes for their success must make the right maintenance decisions to ensure their equipment keeps running. As manufacturing processes differ per organization, each of their maintenance needs will be unique. This post will provide a breakdown of the two premier maintenance strategies used by organizations throughout the country, detailing their significant differences and the benefits they provide to organizations.
The first strategy to be discussed is preventive maintenance. This strategy specializes in a calendar-driven maintenance schedule. With established time intervals set throughout the year, each piece of equipment would receive maintenance. While a blanket strategy like this may seem ineffective, these intervals are actually derived based on factors such as age and run time to deliver the most effective maintenance to the most needing equipment.
The second strategy, predictive maintenance, specializes in a dynamic approach that utilizes real time data collected from an organization’s equipment to determine the most optimal maintenance schedule. This is much more effective in regards to an organization’s maintenance resources but comes with a downside. The costs of these systems are often too high to justify, despite their advantages. While not inaccessible to entire industries, many organizations will be unable to invest into these systems.
The effectiveness of these systems are reliant on the technologies connected to the Internet of Things, and as more organizations invest into these systems and connect their equipment, the more capabilities become possible. For example, the data collected by this equipment has been known to provide unique insight into the fail conditions of equipment and machinery, in addition to ways to combat future failure and avoid excess downtime throughout the year.
Organizations must understand that downtime will inevitably occur throughout the year, though. No maintenance system can ensure a zero percent failure rate. These predictive maintenance systems are just more effective in reducing these downtime rates. With that being said, some issues arise as a result of these systems as well. For example, organizations that don’t possess the training resources necessary to reteach their existing employees about these newly integrated systems will be set back quite a bit. All that said, if your organization is capable of expending the resources necessary to convert to this maintenance strategy, it will likely result in increased efficiency in the long term.
Determining which maintenance strategies provide the most advantages to your organization can be a troubling task. For more helpful information to ease the process, take a moment to review the infographic coupled alongside this post. Courtesy of Industrial Service Solutions.