As a business owner or manager, it is imperative to your organization’s success to have an established maintenance strategy. The needs of every business are unique, so most maintenance schedules will vary by organization. However, what typically has less variance between organizations is the approach they take toward maintenance. Most commonly businesses employ a preventive maintenance approach, however, a more customized approach known as predictive maintenance has become increasingly popular.
Beginning with the former, preventive maintenance is a very traditional approach for organizations around the world. This strategy includes performing maintenance to all required machinery or equipment in an organization’s fleet at regularly scheduled intervals throughout the calendar year. Now, it’s critical to understand that each piece of machinery will likely receive maintenance at different times of the year. The reason behind this is that each of these machines differ in characteristics like age, average run time and even how much available down time is permitted for a particular component of an organization’s fleet. As such, this approach can create a challenge of keeping up with a messy maintenance schedule throughout the year but will always keep an organization’s equipment in solid shape.
The newer alternative to preventive maintenance is predictive maintenance. This strategy disregards a majority of the philosophies of its counterpart. Rather than having scheduled maintenance for equipment or machinery at different times of the year, this approach relies on information fed from each piece of equipment to determine when maintenance is necessary. This requires a unique set of technological systems to be installed into an organization’s fleet but will in turn provide organizations with a much clearer representation of when maintenance is required. The downside? Its exuberant costs compared to the traditional preventive maintenance strategy.
Despite being more expensive on average, the implementation of these predictive maintenance systems are becoming less difficult as more and more companies have made the switch. Why is this? Well, as more and more IoT technologies are connected to organization’s equipment and machinery, the more possibilities arise in regards to maintenance. These systems are able to provide owners and managers with thorough analysis and reporting of the performance of their equipment, in addition to some external data that can be contributing to additional wear. All of this information provides a clearer picture in regards to equipment failure, and the best ways to prevent this failure and extended downtime.
Much like any other alternative, predictive maintenance is not always the solution to your organization’s woes. A majority of organizations won’t ever be able to afford such sophisticated systems. Those that can will be faced with the challenge of integrating these systems into their operations. As this will require some rigid training for existing (and new) employees, this could lead to some unexpected trouble. However, this sort of innovation requires a great deal of patience. So, if your organization is flush with the capital to make this change, it will likely contribute to an increase in efficiency.
For more information on which of these strategies is right for your business, be sure to review the resource below. Courtesy of Industrial Service Solutions.