Preventive maintenance is a preventative measure where predetermined steps can be adapted in case of a prospective machinery failure. Taking this precaution can help increase the safety, reliability of the equipment, enhance performance and reduce costs associated with operation and downtime. 

Manufacturers who intend to transform customer experience and provide high-quality services must employ advanced maintenance protocols to drive growth. An unpredictive outage can incur a significant amount of damage; therefore, monitoring the equipment during regular intervals can help alleviate risks associated with dysfunction and outage. The problem could be anywhere from lubricating the equipment to replacing malfunctioning parts or simply cleaning. 

Being aware of substantial risks and developing a contingency plan to deal with them is crucial to delivering high-quality products and services consistently. Ideally, successful companies have an estimated preventive maintenance percentage greater or equal to 85% to ensure that their business thrives and avoid unprecedented loss. Many demanding companies from various sectors are already employing this smart solution to surpass their competitors.  

Let’s dive into the types of preventive maintenance.

Schedule-based maintenance:

Scheduled-based maintenance involves periodical inspection of the equipment as per a schedule in compliance with the asset guidelines. Considering the basic equipment-specific parameters such as production cycles, sensors temperature, life-span, etc., and closely monitoring these aspects will prevent catastrophic damages in the long run.

Predictive maintenance

Keeping a checklist consisting of potential problems by tracking the history of previous breakdowns of the equipment is an excellent way to notice the patterns to identify and forfend the machinery. This will help dodge emergency disasters and improve the run-time.

Condition-based maintenance:

Condition-based maintenance focuses on the current/running state of the equipment or a particular component that is likely to fail. Predicting minimizes the blow of failure by focusing on the potential consequences and procuring the necessary resources in time to deal with the issue. 

Why is it important to have a Preventive Maintenance strategy?

It is vital to design a preventive maintenance strategy with respect to your company’s goals. Preventive maintenance helps you stay ahead by assessing your asset, equipment parts, maintenance procedures, and other critical information associated with them. 

Preventive maintenance offers several benefits like:

• Schedule tasks to assess the functioning of an asset can help reduce maintenance and operation costs.
• Decreases the potential risk of injuries and promotes the safety of the technicians
• Increases the life-cycle of the machinery
• Ensures reliability 
• Of course, it reduces Downtime, which boosts the overall success rate of the business

How does Preventive maintenance aid in reducing Downtime?

In a whole cycle of production, Downtime is defined as the total offline time of a machine or the period where the device is not active. This includes planned and unplanned Downtime, planned being the scheduled stops for maintenance purposes while unplanned being an unexpected failure or a breakdown. Unplanned downtimes can incur a massive loss in revenue. Let’s look at how a preventive maintenance strategy impacts the company’s sustainability to boost production while simultaneously maintaining the budget.

• Avoid consequences of hardware failure- Detecting failure and performing the required diagnostics or redesigning can prevent operational costs.
• Train the technicians- Enlightening the staff on probable failure modes by teaching them to use detailed software and training them to take immediate action using data analysis and existing statistical data is a successful preventive maintenance practice. 
• Improve reliability- Inspection of the asset concerning its overall data and checklists can limit the probability of failure.
• Smart replacement- predict and import the spare parts on time.
• Improved Safety- Protecting the plant = Protecting your employees. The safety of labour will not be compromised if the equipment is monitored closely to avoid disasters. Let’s face it, recuperating from catastrophic damage can be highly challenging.
• Optimize maintenance procedures- Automatic backups such as predicting and importing spare parts beforehand can avoid scrap production and waste expenditure and provide timely upgrades to reduce Downtime.
• Reduce costs- Failure or deviations in production can only increase the cost and affect the revenue. By identifying the root causes by critical analysis and tending to them can decrease the downtime costs tremendously. 

“Prepare and Prevent, don’t Repair and Repent”- At times, the damage caused by the restoration of equipment after a breakdown could be much higher than a replacement. 

Over 80% of the companies invest in intelligent digital solutions to eradicate downtime-associated problems such as labour and rebuilding costs. Leveraging the power of digital technology solutions to predict and supervise the data can help the technicians unravel complications that could occur in the long run. Adopting digital transformation solutions can improve reliability by over 40%, which can substantially increase productivity. 

Case-Study

Transformed security and unlocked a new revenue stream for a global leader in total laboratory solutions.

Business challenge: The client maintains labs for several renowned organizations. The client had to ensure the security of these labs and required a process-driven approach to security, which includes a series of checks performed on the equipment in the labs on a regular basis. 

The client was looking for a highly efficient, streamlined, and technology-driven process. Being a leading mobile app development company in India, our prior experience in delivering applications, which handle checklist driven processes efficiently caught the imagination of the client.

Our solution: We built a dedicated team to develop a world-class Native application for the client across both Android and iOS platforms. Our solution is an easy-to-use mobile and tablet application, which empowers users to carry out all the security checks in the lab in a hassle-free way. 

It incorporates several noteworthy features like:

• Real-time alerts
• A web portal to monitor the laboratories through dashboards and reports.
• A fully customizable and ready to deploy system, which enables administrators to effectively monitor labs, equipment and testers.

Value delivered:

• 24/7 viability to equipment data
• Real-time equipment monitoring
• Efficient monitoring at minimal cost
• Predictive intelligence for equipment security. 

Challenges faced while designing a Preventive Maintenance Strategy

• Poor Budgeting
• Increased planned Downtime
• Non-essential maintenance costs
• Increased inventory management measures
• Requires time-consuming planning
• Increased maintenance = Increased resources

A good Preventive maintenance strategy should be able to preclude outages, breakdowns, malfunctioning, and subside superfluous expenditures to recommence the manufacturing procedures without any challenges.

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