Four Advantages of Predictive Maintenance and Reliability Partners Four Advantages of Predictive Maintenance and Reliability Partners

By: Akshat Sharma of ITT Global Monitoring & Controls

We live in a world full of machines. From our cell phones and our cars to the pumps we manufacture and the industrial plants where they operate, we’re living in an age of technology never seen before.

Unfortunately, we’re also living in an age where machine unpredictability is running rampant. And while installing updates on our cell phones or getting routine maintenance on our car is part of life, machine downtime in an industrial facility leads to lost time, lost money, and lost resources. Fortunately, the same advancements in technology that have brought about these new machines have also revolutionized how we monitor and maintain equipment.

Maintenance: Reactive vs. Preventative vs. Predictive

The challenge many facility managers are currently facing is that most of their maintenance falls into one of two buckets: reactive or preventative.

Reactive maintenance is simply corrective actions that happen after a breakdown. Extending the car analogy above, this would be taking your car to the shop after you get a flat tire. In other words, you have a problem, so you get it fixed. That’s great if you’re near a tire shop, but if you’re out on the road, you’re looking at significant costs and lost time, in addition to a potentially dangerous situation.

It’s easy to see how this applies to the industrial world as well. If a machine breaks, the repair process can be tedious, often needing a multistep diagnostic process since machine issues aren’t as easy to diagnose as a flat tire. And if you don’t have the right technology or service in place, it could drain resources by requiring multiple different employees to collect and analyze data before determining a solution. And every minute the machine is down, that could be hundreds or thousands of dollars in lost revenue.

To avoid these critical issues, many facility managers turn to preventative maintenance plans instead. Once again using the car analogy, this would be the equivalent of rotating your tires every 3-6 months and checking the tire pressure routinely when you stop to fill up your tank. This is certainly better than simply relying on reactive maintenance, but once again, you’re incurring costs to take the car (or machine, in industrial settings) out of commission to check for problems that may or may not exist. And there’s still no guarantee that a problem won’t arise in between these check-in points and cause a major headache down the road. Therefore, what we’ve seen in recent years is the advancement in technology that leads us to the future of maintenance that we call predictive maintenance. In the car example, this would be the dashboard function that constantly measures your tire pressure, alerting you as it starts to drop and letting you know which tire may have a small leak.

In the industrial world, it’s the use of smart sensors that work by monitoring and logging different parameters such as vibration, speed, pressure and temperature, thereby capturing transient events and malfunctions in real time. This data is quickly processed (often by a reliability partner) and presented to the user or facility manager with actual solutions. This predictive maintenance, enabled by real-time condition monitoring, offers four substantial benefits.

1. Flexibility of Services

Companies can choose to be hands on with their analysis of this data or work with a monitoring partner who will ensure that problems with machines are quickly identified, evaluated, and resolved. Since many facilities may already have an existing process to maintain their machines, this solution allows for the program and resources to be optimized for faster and better results.

2. Increased Productivity

As we’ve established above, when something goes wrong, it leads to a waste of time, money, and resources. There could even be injuries or property and environmental damage that hurts the business. But staff training on using a condition monitoring system for enacting predictive maintenance can lead to a healthy and efficient facility. Educating them on monitoring techniques and how to flag data that could be indicative of a machine failure could resolve an issue before it causes a major shutdown.

3. Stable, Experience Support Staff

Finding top talent in today’s environment is also a major hurdle for manufacturers. Companies that do not have condition monitoring solutions in place tend to be very reactive, spending more money than necessary on diagnostics and solutions while incurring high costs of unplanned downtime. Working with sensors and a reliability partner can ensure uninterrupted support.

4. 24/7 Risk Mitigation

In today’s demanding manufacturing environments, technicians often wear multiple hats and can’t focus their undivided attention on monitoring equipment. For critical equipment and processes, having installed sensors for condition monitoring and a reliability partner at the ready ensures that unplanned events are not the norm. All the data is transferred in real time where it is reviewed by experts. In fact, most companies will find that the lead time for response will be reduced by approximately 50 percent.

There is no one right way to maintain your equipment, but with advancements in technology, it’s clear that predictive maintenance will save facilities time, money and resources. Don’t get stuck waiting for a machine to break. Take control and have a pulse on your machine health with condition monitoring through sensors and a reliability partner. ■

For more information, Email: harvinder.bhabra@itt.com Phone: +44 (0) 7840 849861