Predictive maintenance and condition monitoring provide a whole range of interesting benefits - among them there is a special, often overlooked effect: the strong influence of predictive maintenance and condition monitoring on increasing the quality of your products. For top quality, all components of the machines must ultimately fulfil their functions faultlessly. A brief explanation of how this is interrelated.
Predictive maintenance and condition monitoring prevent or reduce unplanned downtimes. This is certainly one of the most striking, first levers to avoid losses in Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE). After all, it is always about productivity, profitability and effectiveness. It therefore makes sense to continuously determine the condition of plant components and, of course, to improve it within the scope of monitoring.
Predictive maintenance and condition monitoring also reduce the time needed for planned maintenance.
Through prediction in the sense of predictive maintenance, the replacement time of wearing parts can be chosen much more precisely. As a result, spare parts no longer have to be replaced just because the maintenance schedule prescribes replacement after two years, for example. They are only replaced when the end of the remaining service life has actually arrived. This saves money, makes the spare parts inventory more efficient, leads to less effort in maintenance, as well as to a reduction of CO₂, since components that are still functional are no longer thrown away before their time.
Another positive effect is the assurance of quality. If components are heavily worn, or on the verge of "breaking", they no longer fulfil their function properly. The plant may run, but it increasingly produces rejects. Take CNC spindles, for example, whose bearings wear out over time. The bearings themselves will last for a long time. But due to the wear, the usual tolerances in production can no longer be maintained. This phenomenon often manifests itself when the machine is started. It takes much longer to produce the usual quality. The amount of rejects or inferior quality can be reduced, if not prevented, by predictive maintenance and condition monitoring.
So there are a lot of good reasons to rely on predictive maintenance and condition monitoring.
Author: DI. Mag. Markus Loinig
Email: markus@senzoro.com
