Benefits of Predictive and Preventative Maintenance on Equipment

Better Maintenance for Better Sleep?

Unplanned down time keeps product managers and plant supervisors up at night. The thought of the 2am call that “the machine is down” has led many to early retirement. What if machines could have better reliability simply through better monitoring and tracking? We could know the best times to perform maintenance that don’t depend on the best guess based on how long a machine has been running.

Preventative Vs. Predictive Maintenance

There is a fair comparison to be made with car maintenance. The maintenance schedule for an oil and filter change is based on time or mileage. That recommendation ranges from 3 to 6 months, or 3,000 to 7,500 miles (or more!) Those are best guesses for when, on average, a car’s oil and filter should be changed.

This falls under “preventative” maintenance. The maintenance gets done whether it needs it or not and may be getting done later than it should. Or it may be getting done earlier than it should if the vehicle’s engine is under light duty. The optimal time to change the oil and filter is when the lubricant falls below its performance threshold. If that could be continually monitored you could predict precisely when the oil and filter would need to be changed, regardless of how many hours are on the engine or miles travelled since the previous maintenance.

This is where we enter the world of “predictive” maintenance. When we can predict the actual wear of a mechanical item we save money by not replacing items when they still have wear left and avoiding mechanical failure when they have gone too long.

Everyday Predictive Maintenance

Car tires are replaced as part of predictive vehicle maintenance. Typically, tires are not replaced at a specific mileage or time interval. Tire wear is easily measured. If we wanted to, we could measure tire wear weekly and record it for charting. Based on the chart it could be predicted when tires should be replaced if usage patterns were consistent. Tire replacement is optimized as they are replaced when they reach wear limits. If wear is recorded and charted, the time to replace them could further be optimized to be done slightly earlier, for example before a long trip, and budget can be planned and set aside.

Predictive Maintenance for Industry

Building this kind of predictive tracking into automated systems can work the same way. Wear points are identified in the system and metrics are established that can be measured over time. The system is available to maintenance supervisors so they can plan maintenance and any necessary down time optimally. If it is not practical or available to measure the wear condition directly, the fall back is to plan maintenance based on time or amount of usage. This is less precise but is better than not having any plan for maintenance.