The price of downtime in any companies is loss – lost productivity, lost customer loyalty, lost revenue. Downtime may be caused by different reasons, while it usually is machine maintenance. To avoid downtime is important to many business, especially product manufacturers.
Consumer goods companies need to balance the cost associated with planned and unplanned machine downtime versus managing production schedules to satisfy consumer demand. In this scenario, Predictive Maintenance (PM) can offer a great solution to this issue. Although PM sounds very fancy, it’s not a new term, 20 years ago a book called “Condition-based maintenance and Machine Diagnostics” (Williams, Davies and Drake, 1994) has already defined the needs for predictive maintenance.
What if the actual maintenance of equipment is performed only when they needed? What if your assembly lines give an alert to the control system saying that they need maintenance and immediately follows that up with suggested methods? PM focuses on identifying failures before they occur, as well as ensuring maximum machine availability at the same time as keeping the amount of materials consumed by maintenance and repairs to a minimum.
The value from PM is well recognized by the big players of other manufacturing industries. In 2009, Boeing and GE Aviation jointly developed standards for condition based monitoring stating that it “provides a 10-fold increase in real time performance of the Open System Architecture for Condition Based Maintenance (OSA-CBM) standard, making it practical for embedded health monitoring of aircraft systems”. Another report claimed that adopting predictive maintenance can reduce maintenance budgets by 30 to 40 percent.
Today with the emerging trend of machine learning and big data technologies, PM is increasingly seen as a strategic business function. Cresco International, a premier business partner of IBM, helps companies in different sizes to build up proactive strategies to keep maintenance and repair in-house and at a smaller cost, as well as defray initial operating costs for new and growing operations. We understand that many issues shared by larger enterprises, like machine breakdowns, unplanned downtime, low productivity and the costs of replacing machinery, are exacerbated for smaller businesses, which need to stretch each of their resourced dollars even further.
Early issue detection and resolution remains the primary driver for increasing equipment/asset uptime and reducing operator and machine production inefficiencies. For more information about PM, connect with us today at www.crescointl.com.
