Preventive maintenance, Industry 4.0
For the Industry 4.0 practices, this alone is not sufficient, since the underlying reason to incorporate technology into existing processes, among many others, is to improve efficiency and reliability of operations, to reduce costs, and to grow your business. Preventive Maintenance will not offer these functions due to a few reasons:
For Industry 4.0 across the globe, preventive Maintenance is the widely adopted strategy for conducting plant and machinery maintenance condition monitoring. It essentially means timely scheduling of maintenance at regular intervals – while the equipment is still in working condition – to prevent the development of any major fault. Today, all equipment – trucks, appliances, machines, etc., are mostly serviced by adopting Preventive Maintenance standards.
Maintenance is very labor intensive
Preventive Maintenance is often conducted on industry equipment that is in full working mode, causing unnecessary downtime in attending to the equipment, and investing unneeded labor. Besides, due to being labor-intensive, factory maintenance staff needs to be trained and assessed on a regular basis as well, which is costly and inconvenient considering that factories strive for maximum resource optimization and productivity.
Requires large resource investment
With regular preventive maintenance, factories need to invest in more spare parts and consumables. This will again inflate the cost of operations if maintenance is not properly planned.
Unplanned failures cannot be avoided
Although Preventive Maintenance can substantially avoid unanticipated breakdowns due to regular maintenance, in the event of unexpected downtimes, it becomes a big drain on time as well as manpower resources.
Preventive Maintenance will not be cost-effective
As it is plan-based, requires factory maintenance to be scheduled at regular intervals, and particularly will inflate the cost incurred, if equipment maintenance is done prematurely.
Manufacturing plants across the globe are increasingly implementing Industry 4.0 methodologies to make their operations smart. Locating & monitoring is emerging as a disruptive solution to proactive, easy to deploy, cost-efficient, and timely maintenance.
Indoor monitoring & Industry 4.0
This is a component of predictive maintenance. As suggestive of the name, predictive maintenance, unlike Preventive Maintenance, is dependent on the condition of equipment, then a maintenance schedule that is set at regular intervals.
The rise of Industry 4.0 technology in Germany provides the opportunity for dramatically increasing reliability and efficiency in production operations. Industrial Monitoring solutions, from the likes of Ripples IoT, will ease the transition to industry 4.0.
ZF gear is a manufacturer of high-precision gearboxes for the wind energy industry. The factory shop floor has a series of critical equipment in production that needs to work on a 24 x 7 basis. Frequent failures of legacy machines were leading to disruption in the product line. To solve this, our wireless condition monitoring solution, comprised of sensor systems, gateway, and data visualization tools was retrofitted, which would monitor vibrations from the equipment.
In devising a monitoring maintenance plan, the operations team was able to identify gradually developing faults such as irregularities in temperature, pressure, vibration, and humidity levels. This early identification enabled scheduled maintenance, and they were able to plan downtimes needed for maintenance, thus increasing machine availability and reducing overall operating costs.
As seen above, Industrial monitoring is a crucial component of implementing Industry 4.0 practices, and the following are a few of the benefits:
- Reduction in unplanned downtimes
- Lowering labor costs
- Improve equipment availability and manufacturing process reliability
- Improved workplace and worker safety
- Cost savings over traditional preventive maintenance
There are many other advantages besides these when considering Industry 4.0 practices, the major one being that it paves the way for easier adoption of smart factory practices.
Conclusion
A good majority of manufacturing industries are still caught up between the traditional assembly line and the small-scale implementation of automated processes. Their transition to Industry 4.0 practices becomes a great challenge. But to catch up with the highly competitive markets, industries need to look for smart solutions that can make their transition to 4.0 quick, without affecting their performance. RipplesIOT industrial monitoring is one such solution that can ease this transition and pave the way for the adoption of Industry 4.0 practices