As a manufacturing operation’s owner or manager, you’ll be left to decide between which maintenance practices are most efficient for your equipment. Most often, this decision is split between two different maintenance approaches: preventive and predictive maintenance. The differences between these approaches often make deciding between them a challenge, but with the help of this post, any owner or manager should have a much easier time selecting between the two for the sake of their equipment.
Preventive maintenance is the strategy that organizations have fallen back on for years. The strategy is simple, perform routine maintenance to all equipment apart of a manufacturing operation at regularly scheduled intervals throughout the year. Each interval will be different dependent on elements of an equipment like its run time, its age and the availability of downtime. While this strategy has remained successful and stood the test of time, the newer alternative proves to be much more resource considerate. Predictive maintenance includes a much more innovative strategy, predicated on data collected from the equipment of an operation. Through IoT technologies connected to each piece of equipment, owners and managers are more capable of identifying when maintenance is required for their machines. Sounds great, right? Except the systems necessary to collect this data are much more expensive to implement than what businesses would spend just opting into preventive maintenance.
While costs will always remain a barrier for entry, these systems have simplified in regards to their integration in most operations. With more and more interconnected capabilities becoming available for manufacturing equipment, more accurate reporting and analysis can be conducted. This is accomplished through the help of more and more technologies connecting to this IoT network in a manufacturing operation. The analysis of this data is also what allows equipment managers to better predict when their equipment will fail and how to better combat that failure in the future to prevent extended periods of downtime.
Unfortunately what many businesses have come to realize after their investment is that predictive maintenance systems are not always the saving grace that they seem. Those businesses incapable of investing into these systems will never have to deal with the changes necessary to make these systems work to their highest capability. For example, the highly customized technology platforms that employees and managers must become acclimated with. Any operation will struggle with having to put their employees through retraining for these new systems. Sometimes this can mean a completely new outlook on the way their business conducts maintenance. Only if your organization is capable of investing the capital available and has full faith in the employees on board should you ever invest into these maintenance systems.
Does your business currently use a preventive or predictive maintenance approach? If so, and you were hoping to learn more about how the other approach can benefit your business, spend some time reviewing the infographic accompanying this post for more valuable information. Courtesy of Industrial Service Solutions.
