
Thanks to the increasingly flourishing development of technologies in the field of industrial digitization, companies have started to speed up work in the production department.
This facilitation, however, has also led to an increase in the amount of maintenance that needs to be done to machinery within the various production lines.
A type of preventive maintenance that each of us habitually performs is the coupon of the car: we know that we must make the coupon or because we have reached a certain threshold of Km or because it has passed a year since the last coupon.
Reactive or breakdown maintenance: when a component of a machine breaks down, it is only fixed after the damage has been done. The apparent advantage of carrying out this type of repair is the decrease in time/cost of the work done. I say apparent advantage because in reality this type of maintenance can cause long machine downtimes, with the consequence of delaying the production of the entire line and waiting for days for the spare part.
Preventive maintenance: This is based on planned repair activities at elapsed time or working time. This type of maintenance is based on the assumption that all machinery components can degrade over time and that, in order to avoid stoppages/failures during production, repairs to the machinery are scheduled on a regular basis.
Predictive maintenance: is based on objective data collected and processed directly from the machinery of a plant. This allows SMEs to maximize production efficiency by predicting possible production defects and ensuring the maximum interval between repairs, thus minimizing the number of interventions to be made on the machinery.
In this article, we'll focus primarily on predictive maintenance and the benefits it brings to SMBs.
Before we start, however, we must make a small premise: history has taught us that the tried and tested maintenance plans (i.e. TPM - Total Productive Maintenance and RCM - Reliability Centered Maintenance) have not brought the hoped-for benefits to companies due to the great lack of attitude in the workplace to properly use data analysis tools to improve production efficiency.
The imminent advent of digitization of the production process has made, therefore, essential the change of approach with which maintenance was carried out in companies until you get to the great demand from Italian SMEs to implement predictive maintenance within their production.
What are the advantages of predictive maintenance?
Fortunately, today there are several standards that ensure different levels of accuracy and performance, so it's fairly easy to find the right combination of tools to link together.
The main issues are related to three key factors:
You need to rely on experts who know the ins and outs of each type of technology to avoid making the following mistakes:
The main steps are:
Tecnichnician | Analyst |
Experience | data history |
Context and informations | quantitative analysis |
To recap, Predictive Maintenance allows companies to:
a. extend the life of machinery and improve its performance over time
b. Reduce downtime, costly raw material waste and replacement costs for machinery or parts of machinery
c. increase earnings
d. strengthen the quality of products and last but not least the corporate image.
→ If you are looking for a solution that allows you to implement a proper predictive maintenance strategy, AI.Tech Digital Factory and iDaq Analytics are for you.
→ Request a demo, we will be happy to show you the solutions that best meet your needs.
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