In the world of Industry 4.0 and Smart Factory, maintenance can help you achieve much more than simply preventing your machine from failing. Predicting a forthcoming failure and preventing it from happening can increase your machine’s productivity, while also decreasing its maintenance time. Achieving the above relies on one main aspect, which is gathering enough analytics and big data solutions.
A recent study conducted by IndustryWeek in Collaboration with Emerson shows that “unplanned downtime is costing industrial manufacturers an estimated $50 billion each year”.
To be able to proactively react to an asset failure, it is necessary that you have a significant number of failures archived and recorded by your asset. The availability of such detailed asset related data would allow your machine to detect failures reliably early on and therefore estimate the remaining runtime and increase the efficiency of production. This also helps make scheduling easier through a pre-scheduled time interval maintenance system, especially when there are a lot of maintenance activities taking place.
Not only that, predictive maintenance helps maintain machines at certain times, for example outside the production hours of the asset or while the machine controller is nearby. It also assists the purchase department by letting them know beforehand what spare parts are needed to be purchased at a specific point of time.
Keep in mind that not all companies require the equal level of accuracy and reliability of their assets.
Here are some important points to take into consideration when deciding whether or not failure prevention and predictive maintenance is necessary for your enterprise:
- The level of reliability that you expect from your assets
- Your assets average rate of failure
- Your annual maintenance costs
- Your accessibility to needed spare parts at all times
- The need to frequently replace core assets at your enterprise
- The availability of archived assets failure analytics
- Your enterprise’s need and readiness to invest in a predictive maintenance program
- Your ability to achieve a predictive maintenance program with your available technological experts
- The level of expertise of your in-home team
Enterprises could be losing a significant amount of money as a result of unexpected assets downtime. Failure prevention and predictive maintenance is a crucial first step to start reducing the hassle of battling downtime and getting in control of your company’s production system.
Want to know more?
Attend the Virtual Conference Advancing Analytics for Failure Prevention, a conference sponsored by our partner CBT which offers an interchange of system design methodology and machine failure prevention technologies, including predictive maintenance, data management and intelligence, sensor and failure analysis, and the human elements of machinery operation and maintenance.
This event is not available anymore. Please visit our Learning Resources section to discover interesting resources.