No business enjoys being taken by surprise, but the manufacturing world knows unplanned downtime all too well. The production line just went dark. A key piece of machinery has malfunctioned, and productivity has dropped to a crawl. Production stoppages can cost thousands of dollars an hour for every minute that equipment sits idled on the factory floor.
Factories have resigned themselves to the fact that unexpected mechanical problems are simply a cost of doing business.
That is, until smart sensors came onto the scene with predictive maintenance strategies.
Traditional Factory Maintenance Is the Cost-Prohibitive Way to Do Business.
To date, most manufacturers have only known how to address maintenance in two ways: reactive maintenance and scheduled maintenance. First, there is reactive maintenance, which involves repairing a machine that has already experienced a breakdown or malfunction. Otherwise, it was a scheduled visit, where machinery is looked at at predetermined intervals whether they truly required it or not. What most maintenance regimes overlook is the amount of time and money wasted performing needless maintenance, the impact of planned down times that throw off production targets, and unexpected mechanical failures that halt business altogether.
In essence, most maintenance protocols are largely reactive and pay virtually no attention to useful data supplied by individual machines.
Smart Sensors
The use of modern, integrated, and smart technology means machines and manufacturing equipment are getting intelligent. When smart sensors are attached to motors, pumps, compressed air, conveyors and other machinery, they continuously track a wide array of critical metrics that include sound vibrations, pressure levels, temperature and how energy is being utilised to the best of their abilities, feeding all information back to the central AI system where it is collected in real-time.
The AI system can digest what it’s being fed as much as the real data it collects. By learning and storing details of how the equipment is running, the AI builds a picture of what operating “normally” entails, and as soon as data drifts from this baseline, a problem can be detected. Whether it's a subtle fluctuation of noise from vibrations or a small dip in a component's energy consumption, these seem like negligible things on their own, but they become significant indicators of equipment issues ahead. They provide valuable data that signals a component might be in jeopardy before it fails.
Turning Data into Actionable Insights
The next phase, once a significant deviation in normal operation is detected, comes when predictive maintenance comes into play. AI goes to work on data that provides real-time updates without human intervention and issues an alert when an anomaly occurs. Most of the time, the system not only identifies exactly what could be causing the problems but also offers a recommendation on the specific repair that is needed.
So, as the repair team shows up, they will arrive armed and prepared.
Knowing the cause of the mechanical failure or wear and tear means they have the necessary equipment and replacement parts and already understand where and what repair is needed.
The upshot is maintenance is more efficient and affordable because less downtime is taken in order to deal with less disruptive service needs or emergency repairs.
Seeing is Believing - The Numbers Don't Lie
Companies are reporting huge savings and decreased downtime by adopting predictive maintenance with the aid of their smart sensor technology- up to 50 per cent! It only takes minimal time to realise the benefits as businesses have been reporting significant returns on investment when incorporating smart sensor and predictive maintenance solutions into their operations. This not only helps save their money but also increases the lifespan of their machinery and equipment for years to come. In the fiercely competitive manufacturing industry today, where margins can be razor thin and every operational advantage is seized, smart sensors and predictive maintenance strategies have rapidly transcended status symbol to being an outright necessity in the industry for any manufacturer serious about staying competitive.
Aperture Venture Studio builds the ventures that deploy industrial intelligence into factories and operations worldwide via the Internet of Industrial Things. Learn more about what we're creating.
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