What if you could prevent equipment breakdowns and save time, labor and money? Then, preventive maintenance in manufacturing is the answer. The benefits of IoT preventive maintenance solutions are, on average: 25% increase in productivity, 70% breakdown reduction and 25% decrease in maintenance costs.
What Is Preventive Maintenance?
In a smart factory, IoT-enabled sensors monitor and collect data from machines in real time. Then, a preventive maintenance system evaluates the conditions of the equipment based on that data and detects anomalies. This allows engineers to schedule downtime precisely in order to replace parts or perform other maintenance tasks without causing costly disruptions to the production process.
Preventive Maintenance Versus Reactive Maintenance
Reactive maintenance is the traditional form of maintenance. That is, acting once a failure has occurred. It may disrupt the manufacturing processes causing unplanned, and expensive, downtime.
On the other hand, preventive maintenance means acting before a failure occurs so action can be taken immediately. This proactive action results in reduced downtime and costs and increased productivity.
Benefits of Preventive Maintenance in Manufacturing
Preventive maintenance has many benefits, especially in the manufacturing sector:
- Better ROI: predictive maintenance reduces unplanned downtime and eliminates unnecessary tasks, so you save on maintenance costs.
- Longer machinery lifespan: the system alerts about problems well before they cause serious damage.
- Less waste: it allows engineers to fix sub-optimal operations before the machines start making defective products and waste materials in the process.
- Improved performance: it reduces the time and frequency of repairs.
- Equipment protection: it prevents damage to other parts of the machine while repairing it.
Our ELT App: Problems and Solutions
The 4i Platform team developed a web-based app, ELT, that allows you to perform preventive maintenance. How? Our ELT app monitors your assets in real time to detect potential breakdowns and improve efficiency.
Implementing ELT affects your business positively, with an 8% boost in production, 15% downtime reduction, 30% reduction in maintenance costs and 70% more productivity without breakdowns.
We’ll share some of the problems our clients had that ELT was able to solve:
- Wasted time due to unplanned breakdowns and downtimes.
With ELT, you can use the collected data to configure events, e.g. machine performance or breakdowns, and set up an alarm. This way, you can create follow-ups to schedule preventative maintenance tasks and avoid unplanned downtimes, as well as saving money and labor.
- Not knowing a machine’s lifecycle.
The usage trackers process real data, so you’ll know the lifecycle of a machine or piece of equipment with accuracy.
- Not detecting breakdowns in advance.
Thanks to the data collected, ELT can detect in real time breakdowns or failures that can negatively affect the lifecycle of a machine.
- Higher costs when an asset breaks down or stops working during production time.
A broken-down machine causes unscheduled downtime that costs time, money and production loss. ELT allows you to plan downtimes to prevent breakdowns and productivity loss.
Get in touch with a 4i Platform agent to find out how we can help your business run smoothly.
