Every manufacturing operation requires a keen maintenance schedule to ensure its equipment remains running smoothly. Two of the major approaches to routine matka maintenance in the manufacturing industry are preventive and predictive maintenance.
Beginning with the former, preventive maintenance has long been the standard in most manufacturing operations around the world. This established strategy is centered around performing maintenance on an entire collection of equipment at regularly scheduled intervals throughout the calendar year. For most manufacturing operations, how frequently this maintenance occurs is based entirely on the status of their equipment. Sometimes older pieces of equipment may require more frequent maintenance. The same can be said for a piece of equipment that has a higher run time than others in an operation’s fleet of equipment. For these reasons, amongst others, maintenance schedules will vary when utilizing this approach.
The latter is a more forward-thinking alternative to routine maintenance. Predictive maintenance shies away from a blanket approach to maintenance. Rather than maintaining all pieces of equipment on a routine schedule, even the pieces of equipment that likely don’t require any maintenance, predictive maintenance looks to the data that each piece of equipment can provide in order to determine its most optimal maintenance period. This strategy is certainly the more efficient of the two in terms of determining when maintenance is required but is immensely more expensive than the traditional preventive maintenance approach.
Despite being more costly, implementing a predictive maintenance system is becoming increasingly easy. The number of technologies within the Internet of Things space continues to increase, which in turn increases the compatibility with manufacturing equipment around the world. Once properly implemented, these systems are able to capture, report, and analyze the performance and external data that affect any piece of equipment’s condition. With this information, it becomes much easier to predict when any given piece of equipment will require maintenance and what specific maintenance it will require. This, in turn, can lead to greater efficiency and less downtime for critical pieces of equipment.
All of this may make it seem that predictive maintenance is the clear favorite of the two options, but that is far from the case. Predictive maintenance is not the cure-all for unplanned downtime. Having such high barriers to entry makes the investment more inherently risky to less established operations. In addition to high cost, these predictive maintenance systems require highly integrated technology platforms. Meaning existing personnel will need to be retrained and will need to form a new mastery over these systems. If your organization has the expendable capital, and the resources necessary to enable these systems throughout the tracks, predictive maintenance is certainly the best strategy for you.
Whether you’re just beginning your manufacturing business or are looking for alternatives to your current maintenance strategy, check out the featured infographic below for more information on preventive and predictive maintenance. Courtesy of Industrial Service Solutions.
