Simplifying Your Organization’s Maintenance Approach
Any organization that operates in the manufacturing industry is responsible for maintaining their equipment properly in order to keep their business afloat. Every organization’s maintenance needs are unique, but their two main maintenance strategies are often preventive and predictive maintenance. Within this post, these two strategies will be broken down based on their significant differences and the benefits they provide to organizations.
It’s best to start with the most long-standing maintenance strategy of the two: preventive maintenance. This maintenance approach is predicated on regular maintenance intervals for all pieces of equipment throughout the calendar year. Typically these intervals are established based on a few key characteristics of the machinery in an organization’s fleet. Age and run time are the most important aspects to assess when considering what the regular maintenance intervals should be for your organization. In most instances, the machines that are oldest and have the most run time, will require more maintenance throughout the year than those newer machines with far less run time.
Predictive maintenance, on the other hand, is a much more dynamic approach that manufacturing organizations have been taking in recent years. This strategy uses real time data collected from a fleet’s equipment to determine the most optimal maintenance schedule. Unlike preventive maintenance, this would mean that certain pieces of equipment wouldn’t need such regular maintenance compared to the rest of a fleet. Maintaining this equipment as needed is much more effective, but the downside of these systems are the exuberant costs associated with their implementation.
Though a predictive maintenance system is much more costly than a preventive maintenance approach, what has gotten increasingly easier over the years is implementing these predictive maintenance systems into manufacturing operations. As the number of Internet of Things technologies in this space increases, the easier it becomes to capture, report and analyze the output data of each machine in a manufacturing operation. Collecting all of this data gives organizations the ability to more accurately predict when a piece of their equipment will fail and what maintenance is necessary to avoid that failure.
As always, however, unexpected downtime will occur. There is no immaculate maintenance system that will ensure a zero percent failure rate. Not to mention, for most organizations, predictive maintenance systems have barriers to entry much higher than they’re willing to invest in. Even if the capital was available, some organizations don’t possess the training resources necessary to reteach their existing employees about these newly integrated systems in a timely enough manner. In addition to this, new employees would be unable to absorb any sort of mastery from these existing employees. 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.
Despite their differences, each of these maintenance strategies offer some unique advantages to organizations within the industry. For those in search of additional details regarding the two strategies, take some time to review the resource coupled alongside this post. Courtesy of Industrial Service Solutions.
