No business is capable of existing on any level if their maintenance isn’t up to par. Production processes in particular need the machinery responsible for producing to keep kicking at the highest level in order to ensure the businesses’ success. There is no one size fits all maintenance approach unfortunately, but there are two methods in particular that stand out amongst the rest. Those two strategies are known as preventive and predictive maintenance. Though they’re different in how they achieve it, they both have the same goal of ensuring equipment maintains its health and integrity over the long term.
In order to select the right strategy for your business, it’s important to understand how these two strategies differ and what benefits each provides. Preventive maintenance is certainly the more common of the two strategies. This strategy often employs a blanket maintenance schedule, meaning each piece of equipment utilized in a manufacturing operation will have calendar-driven maintenance intervals based on the characteristics of each piece of equipment. For example, a newer, less frequently used machine may only require one scheduled maintenance throughout the year. Whereas an older, little to no down-time machine, may require a handful of scheduled maintenance sessions throughout the year.
Predictive maintenance, which is the much more sophisticated option, is a newer, more innovative strategy that has shown its advantages for manufacturing operations. The philosophy behind predictive maintenance is nearly the opposite of preventive maintenance. Rather than having all of an operation’s equipment serviced at these determined intervals, predictive maintenance references data collected from a businesses’ equipment to identify when maintenance is required. Much more efficient, right? While efficient, the technology necessary to collect this data is much more expensive to implement than what businesses would spend just sticking to the mold and selecting a preventive maintenance strategy.
The technologies in these systems are much more costly than following the traditional preventive maintenance approach. This cost is indicative of the value of these systems though, with more and more capabilities sprouting up as time progresses. These capabilities are directly related to the number of Internet of Things technologies in this space. With more technologies entering the manufacturing industry, the easier it becomes to capture, report and analyze the output data of each machine. In turn, organizations are able to more accurately predict when a piece of their equipment will fail and what maintenance is necessary to avoid that failure.
What every organization must consider despite all of this, however, is that predictive maintenance isn’t always the clear-cut best strategy. There will always be periods of unexpected downtime regardless of the strategy you employ. In addition to this, despite most organizations likely willing to go the way of predictive maintenance, the barriers of entry are rather high. This strategy requires highly sophisticated technology to be implemented, which requires an extensive training process for those conducting maintenance to learn and master.
Aside from the difficulties associated with integrating these maintenance philosophies, there is plenty more to learn about the ins-and-outs of these two major maintenance approaches. To learn more about them, be sure to check out the infographic alongside this post. Courtesy of Industrial Service Solutions.