A Breakdown Of The Impact Maintenance Has On Organizational Success

Each piece of equipment in a manufacturing operation is important. The health of the equipment is paramount, but how do most businesses take care of their equipment? It’s no secret the process is challenging, but most often businesses are left to decide between two core maintenance approaches. Preventive maintenance, which is an established industry standard. Or predictive maintenance, which is much more sophisticated in nature, but much more effective.

Let’s begin with the former. Preventive maintenance has been the standard for some time in the manufacturing industry due to its simplicity. The strategy is as follows: schedule maintenance for each piece of equipment in intervals throughout the year based on critical elements of the equipment. Meaning organizations with older pieces of equipment may need to bring in a technician to work on this equipment much more frequently than their newer equipment. The same can be said for equipment with varying run times, as the equipment that sees more use will often require more tuning than equipment that rarely sees use. Finding the optimal maintenance time for any equipment with this strategy is tricky.

The alternative is a much more effective maintenance approach for organizations hoping to maximize their maintenance resources. Predictive maintenance strategies require sophisticated systems that connect to an organization’s fleet or equipment. Once connected, these systems are able to collect and analyze output data of each piece of equipment. This data is then able to indicate when a machine will face critical failure and what maintenance is required to prolong that failure. The efficiency that these systems provide comes at a steep cost, though. As these system’s barriers to entry are high, many organizations are unable to integrate this maintenance approach.

As previously mentioned, the cost for these systems is typically what stops organizations from relying on them. The organizations that can afford these systems, however, are contributing to the betterment of these systems for organizations that plan to switch in the future. As the number of machines connected to the Internet of Things increases, so do the capabilities that these systems can offer. More accurate capturing, reporting and analysis comes as a result of more and more equipment joining the network. The more accurate the data, the more likely that organizations can improve efficiency and decrease the amount of downtime their equipment experiences.

It’s worth nothing, though, that not every organization will blend well with a predictive maintenance approach. Not only can the cost keep certain organizations from being able to invest, these systems also require a retraining process for new and existing employees to get the most out of them. Even after initial investment and retraining, there’s no way to guarantee eliminating all downtime from any piece of equipment. There are going to be situations where predictive maintenance systems may fail the same way preventive maintenance approaches fail. Finding the right approach for your organization will take time.

If you’re a manufacturing manager currently developing a maintenance strategy right for your organization, take a moment to check out the infographic paired alongside this post. Courtesy of Industrial Service Solutions