Why Your Approach to Industrial Maintenance Should Be Varied
Posted on: 23 August 2018
If your business features a complicated production process, where you rely on several diverse pieces of equipment to produce your end result, then you have to craft a strategic but flexible industrial electrical maintenance plan. Each one of your key machines may have a different mode of operation, and you may well have a raft of other electrically-powered components to provide support. However, you cannot expect to apply a standard maintenance practice in this situation to ensure optimal 'uptime', but you must manage a different approach in each area. How can you put this type of support package together effectively?
Flexible Approach
In this type of business, your number one priority will be to ensure maximum productivity so that you can hit your target. However, you also need to ensure safe operation to protect personnel, the business in general and your asset investment. You also have to look carefully at energy efficiency. You need to be able to extend the useful life of all your equipment and improve the management of any spare parts inventory and will need to approach maintenance from four different angles.
Reactive
If you think that you need to anticipate problems before they begin in all cases, you may not be completely correct. While this is definitely part of the equation, it may be more advantageous for you to react to failure as soon as it happens. This is not the approach for key pieces of equipment, of course, but when nonessential tools wear out and do not affect ultimate productivity, it may be far more cost-effective to deal with them at that time.
Preventive
Your next focus should be on preventive maintenance, where you set up a schedule and stick to it through regular inspection and action. This will help to prevent any unplanned activity as long as you work on good quality data. You can refer to manufacturer recommendations or industry best practice to cover this area.
Diagnostic
Next, you should introduce equipment that can help you to diagnose the operational condition of an asset in real-time and compare this to a measurable parameter. This will enable you to make amendments immediately if necessary, as you engage this form of condition-based maintenance.
Predictive
When you focus on the truly critical pieces of equipment, then you need to continuously monitor performance, so that you can predict any issues. Once again, this uses a variety of different sensors and data-gathering capability and it can be linked into advanced IT infrastructure.
You will know in very finite detail how each piece of equipment has worked through its history and can identify even the slightest change or movement away from the baseline. With this "holy grail" approach to maintenance, you should avoid the vast majority of breakdowns and any interruption to your critical flow.
Team Members
Make sure that you have competent personnel available for each stage of your maintenance plan, and only engage electricians that are experienced in this type of industrial environment.
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