
The Why and How of Predictive Maintenance for Manufacturing
Predictive Maintenance aims to revolutionize the manufacturing industry by leveraging key manufacturing process data to make proactive decisions rather than reactive decisions related to key processes.
Whether your organization is discarding significant chunks of critical data or is unable to assess the significance of data that they house in repositories, predictive maintenance may provide the needed enhancement to an existing manufacturing strategy to leverage critical data and use it to limit challenges that stifle critical business processes.
Predictive Maintenance: A Brief Introduction
Anyone who belongs to or hails from a manufacturing ecosystem will always vouch that there isn’t a single day in this field that doesn’t witness failures and breakdowns. As a field that deals exclusively with equipment and machinery programmed to carry out a repetitive task, the malfunction’s scope is inevitable. Thus, most manufacturing industries’ objective is not to eliminate this margin of error but to instead minimize it to such an extent that it helps them achieve high-efficiency standards and deliver quality products in the process.
Thanks to the rapid evolution of science and technology, companies no longer need to rely on rudimentary techniques such as importing data to spreadsheets and analyzing insights manually to track their operations’ progress. With the rise of tools such as the Internet of Things and Big Data, organizations now have the ability to leverage machine data to limit the costs and impacts of the odd downtime, irrespective of whether it is planned or unplanned. This protocol of crisis management is, in a nutshell, referred to as predictive maintenance.
Why is Predictive Maintenance Important?
In industries like manufacturing, where depreciation is a vital cost and advanced equipment is high-priced, ensuring sound asset management becomes rather critical in ensuring the sustainability and the longevity of the manufacturing unit in question. Implementing the model of predictive maintenance in these setups allows one to save substantial costs at multiple ends. Even though there are protocols such as lean management and six sigma, whose sole purpose is to enhance a unit’s efficiency, their relevance comes under the scanner in the current scheme of things.
In a day and age where technology has come to dictate almost every tangible aspect of our lives, it has become imperative to have efficiency protocols in place that are driven by cutting-edge technology. In essence, predictive maintenance aims to elevate asset management methodology backed by maintenance-enabled technology. According to a PwC report, implementing predictive manufacturing in maintenance reduced the costs by 12 percent and improved the uptime by a factor of 9 percent. Additionally, it also extends the lifetime of aging assets by 20 percent, bringing down safety, environmental, quality, and health risks by as much as 14 percent.
How Does Predictive Maintenance Work?
While the general construct of predictive maintenance is primarily intuitive, it takes into account a host of sensor data to monitor the machine’s condition at all times effectively. These sensors include pressure, rotation speeds, temperature, current, vibration, and chemical properties.
Depending on the unit under consideration, the predictive maintenance model considers the readings generated by these sensors to predict potential hazards and subsequently issue maintenance work orders. Each of these sensors is responsible for monitoring a different aspect of the unit. Hence, the values of their readings are directly indicative of the state of the machinery in question. For instance, vibration analysis provides insights into possible breakdowns and may be treated as the early signs of an imminent component failure. Similarly, the temperature sensor’s high readings may indicate a particular component approaching a possible meltdown shortly. Usually, the protocol is invoked whenever the readings lie either below or above the designated average or ‘normal’ value.
This story has been published by a wire agency without modification to the text. iotforall.com