How Does Predictive Maintenance Provide Value?

ARTICLE

Implementing and understanding predictive maintenance is essential if unplanned downtime has a high impact on your production schedule.

Predictive Maintenance Definition

Predictive maintenance is a critical tool in optimizing the effectiveness of industrial machinery and plant assets in a production environment. Predictive maintenance techniques analyse historical performance data from machinery and asset systems to identify potential risks and optimize their performance. These techniques identify maintenance issues before they occur, thus decreasing unplanned downtime and reducing operating costs. It is a step-by-step process to optimize your production process. Predictive maintenance can be performed remotely, or “on site” (in the plant) with equipment-specific algorithms and has become an essential component of the modern manufacturing organization.

Advantages of predictive maintenance

Predictive maintenance (PdM) is a process of collecting data about a machine’s physical characteristics and its operating condition, followed by analyzing and predicting the outcomes of those characteristics. PdM makes equipment maintenance and repairs both predictable and preventative. PdM can result in a high increase in productivity. Utilizing PdM to predict a machine’s imminent failure can eliminate costly, unscheduled downtime, and keep your operations running as smoothly as possible. PdM can also improve quality, consistency, and repeatability of your processes. The physical and environmental conditions of a plant can change significantly over the course of the day.

With predictive maintenance, you use the data you have to create your plant’s own map of faults and when they are likely to occur, i.e., predict the failure point for the machines. From there you can take measures to mitigate them before they become unplanned.

Benefits of predictive maintenance

Predictive maintenance can provide visibility on key asset health indicators that improve availability and help avoid costly unplanned downtime. Having the right data at the right time helps maintenance and reliability professionals to determine the ideal time to schedule maintenance activities. This also turns to be a cost-effective option as it prevents costly downtimes.

PdM also plays a vital role in improving the workplace safety. Fatal accidents may occur at workplaces, due to machine failures, which can have heavy financial and legal implications. These can also be avoided to a large extent with the help of a PdM system implementation.

Impact of predictive maintenance

With advances in industrial automation, predictive maintenance tools can help increase uptime, reduce downtime, enhance plant productivity and improve plant efficiency. The important thing to remember about predictive maintenance is that it can bring about tremendous efficiencies in production. You can improve asset availability, production, throughput, and revenue, which will have a huge impact on your profitability.

Benefits of predictive maintenance

Impact of predictive maintenance

Value creation with predictive maintenance

Implementing and understanding predictive maintenance is essential if unplanned downtime has a high impact on your production schedule. There are several different ways predictive maintenance can provide value: Unplanned downtime will drop down from a 2 to 1 margin of safety for every 100 hours the asset is down, to a 1 to 20 margin of safety. A Deloitte study found that PdM can on average, increase the productivity by 25%, reduce breakdowns by 70% and lower the maintenance costs by approximately 25%. Automated AI-based predictive maintenance solutions can proactively pinpoint the exact point of failure, thereby allowing maintenance professionals to schedule the repairs and maintenance at the most cost-effective times.

Without predictive maintenance, a plant can lose an entire shift on a simple ignition or valve problem. A leak in one location is not as dangerous as a leak somewhere else. With a combination of wireless industrial IoT sensors and Artificial Intelligence, the plant personnel will be alerted to a potential problem and, if necessary, technicians can be dispatched to assess, repair or replace the part before the problem gets out of hand.

Conclusion

The term predictive maintenance has been in use for quite some time, and it has gained more traction and adoption in recent years. The importance of predictive maintenance has garnered the attention of top executives and maintenance & reliability professions, mainly due to the far-reaching implications from the loss of production.

Many companies are still in the early stages of implementing predictive maintenance in their plants. More and more executives are interested in seeing what IoT solutions for industrial manufacturing has to offer. Successful implementation and high return on investment depends on making sure you have a clear definition of the end goal from an integrated PdM solution. As awareness increases, this will help those companies that are already using the solution to obtain a more specific understanding of how it can be implemented and what it will take to use it effectively.

Predictive maintenance is a valuable tool that improves the reliability of your equipment and helps mitigate maintenance problems. Doing it correctly and effectively requires specific preparation before you start. Contact Nanoprecise to know how you can implement an AI based Predictive Maintenance Solution tailored to your plant needs.