The Influence Of Maintenance On Your Organization’s Success

While it is inherently frustrating to own or manage any manufacturing operation, solving the woes of these processes is often accomplished through a more refined maintenance approach. Lacking a maintenance strategy fit to care for all of the machinery in any operation will limit success quite a bit. Of course, every organization has different equipment to tend to, so their allocation of maintenance resources throughout the year will vary. Despite this, it’s more than likely that the maintenance strategy will be either of two options, preventive or predictive maintenance.

It’s best to start with the most long-standing maintenance strategy of the two: preventive maintenance. This maintenance approach is predicated on regular maintenance intervals for all pieces of equipment throughout the calendar year. Typically these intervals are established based on a few key characteristics of the machinery in an organization’s fleet. Age and run time are the most important aspects to assess when considering what the regular maintenance intervals should be for your organization. In most instances, the machines that are oldest and have the most run time, will require more maintenance throughout the year than those newer machines with far less run time.

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.

Though a predictive maintenance system is much more costly than a preventive maintenance approach, what has gotten increasingly easier over the years is implementing these predictive maintenance systems into manufacturing operations. As the number of Internet of Things technologies in this space increases, the easier it becomes to capture, report and analyze the output data of each machine in a manufacturing operation. Collecting all of this data gives organizations the ability to more accurately predict when a piece of their equipment will fail and what maintenance is necessary to avoid that failure.

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.

As the information shared within this post indicates, without a proper hold on the maintenance of any machinery or equipment, a business relying on their manufacturing operations could face catastrophic failure. To avoid this, be sure to review the infographic featured alongside this post for more valuable information related to the impact of maintenance on success. Infographic courtesy of Industrial Service Solutions.