Downtime and failures are bound to happen in a manufacturing company. However, if it happens too frequently, it can affect the quality and efficiency of production. If one machine breaks, it can cause a load of delays in your company.
To help you learn how to avoid this, here is what you need to know about predictive maintenance (PDM).
What Is Predictive Maintenance?
PDM is how you predict maintenance requirements for your machines on the factory floor. When you analyze operational data from your machines, you will see patterns to know when you will have to maintain a unit. When you plan to maintain a product to fix or replace it using things, like vibration analysis. By doing this, you will be saving tons of time and money.
How Will Your Company Benefit?
The main benefit you can get from PDM is that it can help you optimize your planned downtime to make it more efficient. You can get significant savings since you maximize the life and uptime of a component. It will also reduce how much-unplanned downtime your company experiences.
Industrial manufacturers lose around $50 billion annually due to unplanned downtime. With PDM, you will be proactive because you made sure all your machinery runs smoothly and decreases the number of breakdowns and repairs. For instance, replacing items with new ones, like downhole products can significantly help your company.
If you were to let a machine keep running with a worn-out part, it could create a lot of damage to other components of the machine. With PDM, you can avoid letting your machines get more damaged by fixing a problem before it starts.
PDM can also help you increase revenue. For instance, your maintenance costs will reduce by 10 to 40 percent, and you will reduce waste by 10 to 20 percent. When you use advanced analytics, you will find new ways to improve and optimize your operations daily.
How Can You Implement It?
Now that you know predictive maintenance is a great way to reduce manufacturing costs and avoid unplanned downtime, you have to figure out how to implement it. Firstly, you need to identify the problem you want to fix.
Are you more worried about the cost of an item failing or the amount of unplanned downtime? Do you have specific machinery that is more important than the others? You should then create a baseline of the data on your machine performance or assess the existing status. You can review every machine to see what its performance levels were, including
- How frequently maintenance is scheduled?
- What parts regularly fail?
- How often the item gets down?
Now, you have to look at the historical data to search for patterns and look at the metrics to see if there is a problem. Once you see the data and patterns, you need to make a process to update the data continually. You also have to review it to make sure it keeps reflecting on the existing status. It will also flag any deteriorating patterns that let you know you need to perform maintenance. Remember, you cannot predict anything without analysis.
Predictive maintenance is more than just a trend in the manufacturing industry. It is one of the efficient ways to help your company grow and prosper.
