Manufacturing Magazine June 2015 | Page 10

TECHNOLOGY
THE MAJORITY OF maintenance is reactive ( fix it when broke ) or preventive ( fix it just in case ). However , there has recently been a strong drive towards predictive maintenance which overcomes the drawbacks of reactive and preventative maintenance by constantly monitoring actual equipment condition and using the data to predict when a problem is likely to occur .
If it works well , the advantages are three-fold : it can minimise maintenance and down time , cut production hours lost to maintenance , and reduce the cost of spare parts and supplies .
While it is fair to suggest that the hype surrounding buzzwords such as Industry 4.0 , Big Data and IoT have bought the idea of predictive maintenance to the fore , it is not a flash in the pan concept and could save manufacturing firms both time and money , if implemented correctly .
Don ’ t believe all the hype As Dan Somers of Warwick Analytics attested : “ Predictive maintenance is certainly neither new nor a nirvana by
Constant monitoring
10 June 2015