The Maintenance Preparation Needed To Perfect A Manufacturing Operation

While many believe that managers have a tough time of enabling their employees, the toughest job that managers have to deal with, particularly related to manufacturing operations, is ensuring that their equipment is receiving the best care possible. This level of care is directly related to the likelihood of success for any manufacturing operation. So how do most businesses go about making sure their equipment is well maintained? Many businesses default to one of the two major maintenance strategies, known as preventive and predictive maintenance. Throughout this post, the most significant differences between these two strategies, in addition to the benefits they provide to organizations, will be broken down in detail.

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.

The newer, and certainly more efficient, strategy for maintaining an organization’s equipment comes in the form of predictive maintenance. Rather than focusing on set maintenance intervals throughout the year, this strategy employs a sophisticated set of technological systems that integrate into an organizations’ equipment. Once installed, these systems are able to collect and analyze a collection of performance and external data related to the equipment and its maintenance needs. In turn, organizations are better able to predict equipment failure and determine the most optimal maintenance schedule for each piece of equipment. The major issue with this approach, however, has to be its costs.

While the costs associated with this maintenance strategy might be higher than most organizations can stomach, what has become increasingly easier is implementing these systems into an organization’s operation. Largely in part due to more and more organizations opting into this strategy, and thus expanding the IoT’s capabilities as mentioned previously. The more organizations that utilize this strategy, the more intuitive the insights that these systems can provide to organizations. If you’re hoping to improve efficiency through a decrease in unexpected downtime, predictive maintenance is definitely your best bet.

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.

Hoping to ease the burden on your organization’s production managers? The information found within the infographic featured alongside this post will include a number of the nuances that any business can adopt to hopefully ease the maintenance process. Infographic courtesy of Industrial Service Solutions.