The data analytics revolution has the potential to transform the way companies organize, operate, develop talent, create value, and service their customers. The momentum is building in many companies, but only a few are reaping major rewards from their data. Companies are doing a great job connecting assets, equipment, and devices, as well as gathering all that information into distributed databases. However, the challenge lies in finding ways to listen to what the equipment is telling us and responding in useful, actionable, and intelligent ways that improve business operations and reduce costs. Effective listening enables companies to move away from reactive maintenance activities and move towards predictive maintenance activities. True success will come from breaking down the walls of silence between employees and the assets they are managing. Unfortunately, many asset management solutions gather and report data with little thought on how to support the change from reactive maintenance to predictive maintenance.
Read More →3 Key Components to Enable Predictive Maintenance
The ultimate goal of predictive maintenance is to reduce valuable machinery downtime. Predictive maintenance has become an essential tool for almost every industry because of its efficiency in detecting faults during the early stages of failure, allowing for a much simpler, safer, and cheaper repair solution than the alternative: catastrophic failure. Today, companies are adopting predictive technologies at staggering rates. According to Markets and Markets Research, the market size for predictive maintenance technologies is just above $1.4 billion and is expected to eclipse $5 billion by 2021 with the help of IoT. As with any program, there is a very simple formula for predictive maintenance success. There should be an owner, someone who is held accountable and responsible. There should also be attainable goals for the program; understanding what program success looks like may mean that the owner needs to go through extensive training. An evaluation of current program maturity should follow with a comparison with best practice. Then a proper roadmap can be built to bridge the current state to the future, best practice state. Because most companies operate with limited resources, one of the toughest jobs is going to be prioritizing the time, money, and energy spent on certain initiatives to close the gap.
Read More →IoT Enables Predictive Maintenance
Over the past ten years or so there have been many smart manufacturing initiatives that have promoted the need for production facilities to become much more efficient and effective through the use of technology. The concept of the connected factory, achieved through the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), is being implemented, which is significantly driving up operational effectiveness, resource utilization and a digital visibility of production and process metrics never before thought possible.
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