Can any manufacturing organization truly rely on just their output to succeed? The truth is, no. They must prioritize keeping the equipment that allows them to produce this output in quality shape in order to maintain success. This is accomplished through routine maintenance and frequent checkups. Within this post, two of the main strategies used by countless manufacturing organizations worldwide, preventive and predictive maintenance, will be analyzed based on the benefits they provide to organizations.
Beginning with the latter, preventive maintenance is a rather customary strategy compared to predictive maintenance. This strategy is predicated on a calendar-driven system. Meaning the maintenance organizations would conduct would be based on established time intervals throughout the year. This isn’t to say each piece of equipment would require significant maintenance within these intervals, nor that all of the pieces of equipment in a fleet would be worked on at the same time. Rather this strategy is mean to establish scheduled maintenance at different parts of the year for each piece of equipment based on factors such as age and run time, amongst others.
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.
While the costs of these systems are inherently higher than those of its counterpart, the implementation continues to become easier. As more and more technologies in this space are added to the Internet of Things, more and more capabilities become possible. Currently, these systems are put in place to more accurately schedule maintenance. As mentioned previously however, these systems also provide unique insight into the fail conditions of certain pieces of equipment and machinery, in addition to ways to combat future failure and thus avoid downtime throughout the year.
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.
As it’s been pointed out, while these two maintenance strategies do differ in major ways, their goal is always the same. The same should be said for the organizations utilizing the strategies. Prioritizing the health of machinery over the gains of an organization is imperative for long term success. For more valuable intel related to these two strategies, take a minute to view the infographic included alongside this post. Infographic courtesy of Industrial Service Solutions.