An Evaluation Of Major Maintenance Strategies
A successful manufacturing operation will always be at the mercy of the machines that enable it. Each and every process operates much more efficiently when a machine is operating at its full potential. Reaching this potential requires regularly scheduled maintenance, typically in the form of preventive or predictive maintenance. This post will detail these two maintenance procedures in detail.
Preventive maintenance is a long-standing strategy in the manufacturing industry. This strategy is rather simple: schedule routine maintenance to each individual piece of manufacturing equipment within an operation and perform maintenance on them at those scheduled intervals. Some intervals will be different for different sets of equipment. For example, older pieces of equipment may require additional maintenance than newer pieces of equipment over the same time period. As such, the intervals for these older pieces of equipment may be shorter than the newer pieces of equipment in a particular operation. The same could potentially be said for pieces of equipment that see more use than other pieces of equipment.
While they might be more expensive on average, predictive maintenance systems are becoming easier to implement by the day. As the number of Internet of Things technologies that are made specifically for the manufacturing industry increase, so do the possibilities they present. For example, these IoT technologies are able to provide equipment owners with in-depth reporting and analysis of performance and external data on their equipment. This in turns allows equipment owners to better predict when their equipment will fail and what maintenance measures should be taken in order to prevent said failure and ensure greater efficiency over time.
As mentioned previously, a majority of business owners have come to understand that the barriers to entry for transitioning to a predictive maintenance strategy are quite high. Not only do these systems cost an exuberant amount of capital, they also require a highly customized set of training protocols that organizations must educate their employees on. No matter the status of your organization, this can be challenging. Whether it be trying to teach long-standing employees new systems and protocols that go against everything they may’ve known previously in their time with an organization, or new employees completely unaware of what they’re getting themselves into, you’re bound to face some challenges. Regardless of this, if your organization has the available capital to invest in these systems, it is worth the investment. While the training might not be easy, your employees will eventually transition more smoothly, and the benefits would outweigh the costs.
Do you believe your organization has all of the necessary capabilities to support a predictive maintenance system? For more information on the way that your manufacturing operations could benefit from the integration of these systems, in addition to how machine life can be extended, take a minute to review the infographic featured alongside this post. Courtesy of Industrial Service Solutions.
