Manufacturing operations worldwide would fail without a maintenance strategy to support their equipment. Selecting this maintenance strategy is often one of the toughest challenges these businesses will face. Often times, the selection is left between two premier maintenance strategies: preventive and predictive. This post will detail both in length.
Beginning with the former in preventive maintenance, this is by far one of the most common maintenance approaches in the manufacturing industry today. In this strategy, routine maintenance is performed on each piece of equipment in an organization’s fleet in intervals throughout the year. These intervals are often determined by some key characteristics of the piece of equipment at hand. Its age, its run-time and other existing conditions that may impact performance are all considered. Sometimes spontaneous maintenance is required, which totally disregards these intervals. Which eventually would give birth to another maintenance approach in predictive maintenance. This strategy utilizes integrated technology to connect equipment to the Internet of Things in order to analyze real-time data to determine the most impactful maintenance schedule.
While it may seem as though predictive maintenance strategies are the obvious choice, it’s worth mentioning just how expensive they truly are. Most organizations could fund their entire predictive maintenance approach through the capital necessary to make these predictive systems work. All that being said, it’s still worth considering how each of these strategies could impact your organization. The resource featured alongside this post serves as a great guiding force for businesses unsure on which strategy is right for them.
As the infographic points out, these predictive systems are becoming easier and easier to integrate into a businesses’ operations. In fact, as more and more equipment is connected to this network, the capabilities of these systems improves. The reporting and analysis possible becomes that much more accurate as a result of these connections. Meaning machine failure can be better predicted and thus avoided, making them an obvious best choice for the long-term.
There are a few challenges that come alongside these predictive systems though. First and foremost the cost. Of course some organizations can stomach the cost, but can they handle the amount of training necessary to get the most out of these systems? Employees with an engrained understanding of previous maintenance approaches may have to completely reevaluate their positions and their responsibilities as a result of these systems. Only organizations with employees capable of supporting this transition should consider it.
This post serves as a great resource for learning more about these two maintenance approaches. For more in-depth information, please be sure to review the infographic coupled alongside this post. Courtesy of Industrial Service Solutions.
