Every industrial process relies on complex equipment. An equipment failure can lead to a total shutdown for your company until it’s resolved. A great deal of time is spent making sure each machine functions at its best, but where does that time come from? Valuable personnel, who despite their best efforts, are still only human. Automated asset monitoring has reached maturity and can greatly improve your operations on a number of levels. Let’s look at the benefits of this technology.
Using Asset Monitoring Technology: What Are the Benefits?
Liberate Your Engineers
The bulk of an engineer’s time at a factory consists of monitoring and maintaining equipment in order to keep things running. They are essentially a very expensive form of insurance. What if you could instead invest once and get the same monitoring ability, thus saving your company significant sums in the long term? That’s what automated asset monitoring offers. Installing sensors that constantly monitor your machines’ status frees up your engineering staff.
With that newfound freedom you become more versatile as an organization. Task your team with new projects, help your business expand, or consolidate your workforce to reduce costs. The choices are yours, but they’re only available when you make automation a priority. Even older machines can be retrofitted with modern sensors that communicate to receivers, which then transmit data wirelessly for processing. You get a thorough report in far less time than any engineer could muster.
Reduce Downtime With Automated Monitoring
Cutting the man hours needed to monitor your hardware is just the start. Modern sensors can monitor your equipment far better than humans can with handheld tools. In addition, since they constantly collect data, you can more accurately predict when a component is likely to fail. Humans generally have no choice but to rely on the service schedule set out by the part’s manufacturer. But failures rarely follow a schedule.
With predictive maintenance, you can detect issues before they become serious. You can schedule repairs to minimize downtime as opposed to dealing with them when they appear. A great example comes from Allied Reliability, a company that implemented automated monitoring to track vibration in their machines. They were able to find flaws that couldn’t previously be diagnosed. They addressed their previously inexplicable vibration problem and increased the life expectancy of their assets.
Optimize Your Processes
Monitoring your assets creates a valuable pool of data that only gets larger and stronger over time. Eventually, you’ll be able to analyze your entire operation’s performance at a macro scale. This can help you to optimize processes and identify bottlenecks in your production. You can use this data to prioritize upgrades and plan future spending more efficiently. You gain a more thorough understanding of what is working and what can be improved.
What’s more, since your data can be accessed from anywhere, you won’t need to constantly schedule visits to the plant to make sure everything is running smoothly. This frees up even more time for your staff and makes your response time quicker in the event something unexpected occurs. All of this combines to produce a significant return on your investment.
Simplify Future Deployments
Every business hopes to grow. With your staff free to focus on the big picture, and a wealth of data at your fingertips, you can make your next deployment successful from the start. Scaling up becomes much easier when you know exactly how to avoid mechanical failures thanks to the data you derived from monitoring your assets over the years.
This is why you see large manufacturers like Land Rover and Jaguar investing in this technology. They’ve been using it for years now, and it’s helping them cut production costs and increase production volume in record time.
Protect Your Investment
Industrial businesses require massive capital to start operations. The more you protect your investment, the greater the return you can expect over time. Monitoring your industrial assets is critical if you hope to maximize return and continue to grow. So, what do you need to get started?
At SAAB RDS, we’re experts in helping industries modernize and embrace technology. We can visit your facilities to recommend a series of implementations that will give you the power to predict failures, prevent problems, and grow your business. Contact SAAB RDS today to schedule a meeting.