How Maintenance Contributes To An Organization’s Success

Any business involved in some form of manufacturing operation will only be as successful as their machinery allows them to be. Without a maintenance strategy to tend to these machines, that success will be quite limited. Each organization has different equipment to tend do, so their maintenance schedules may vary a bit. What often doesn’t vary are the two different maintenance approaches organizations take, predictive and preventive maintenance.

Beginning with the latter, preventive maintenance is a rather customary strategy compared to predictive maintenance. This strategy is predicated on a calendar-driven system. Meaning the maintenance organizations would conduct would be based on established time intervals throughout the year. This isn’t to say each piece of equipment would require significant maintenance within these intervals, nor that all of the pieces of equipment in a fleet would be worked on at the same time. Rather this strategy is mean to establish scheduled maintenance at different parts of the year for each piece of equipment based on factors such as age and run time, amongst others.

Recent developments have brought about a newer, more forward-thinking approach to maintenance. Predictive maintenance systems employ a strategy that includes integrated technology into a businesses’ fleet of machines or equipment. This technology then reads and decodes the output data, in addition to external data that can be affecting efficiency, of an organization’s fleet for a more real-time analysis of when certain machines may require maintenance. While this strategy is clearly the more efficient of the two, it is also substantially more expensive. For most organizations, these systems can even seem unobtainable.

While the costs of these systems are inherently higher than those of its counterpart, the implementation continues to become easier. As more and more technologies in this space are added to the Internet of Things, more and more capabilities become possible. Currently, these systems are put in place to more accurately schedule maintenance. As mentioned previously however, these systems also provide unique insight into the fail conditions of certain pieces of equipment and machinery, in addition to ways to combat future failure and thus avoid downtime throughout the year.

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.

Maintaining machinery and equipment is a vital part of sustaining any organization’s success. Any organization searching for more information should take some time to consult the infographic accompanying this post. Courtesy of Industrial Service Solutions.