New predictive technologies for the maintenance of industrial installations

A proper use of predictive technologies for the maintenance of industrial facilities will help maintenance planners, maintenance and engineering managers and managers to have fewer breakdowns and more profits. This requires a change of strategy.

When we mention a change of strategies it can be difficult to do, especially in plants, where the dominant culture is the "this is how we have always done it" mentality.

The forces driving change must be strong enough to overcome the inevitable reaction. The factors driving the decision making to deploy predictive technologies for industrial facility maintenance are the desire to:

• Reduce operational costs,
• Reduce maintenance costs, and
• The need to improve uptime.

There are still maintenance managers who are not taking the time to justify what they are achieving in terms of ROI with the use of predictive technologies. And many are not even showing their superiors what they are achieving in terms they can understand.

The truth is that there are many technicians in predictive maintenance The work of the competent authorities is doing an impressive job with the condition monitoring technologies and axle alignment with which they have been equipped, but are still hobbled by a lack of proper communication.

It is unfortunate that some still doubt the reported findings because the asset is apparently working perfectly well when the recommendation was made to repair something that is apparently not damaged and we can now detect a potential failure long before it starts to manifest itself and thus plan the resources of the maintenance department much better.

This translates into better management, which obviously has a positive impact on the department's bottom line.

Not only people are interconnected, but assets will be too. 

Now it is easy to imagine an interconnected plant where machines "talk" to each other and diagnose problems on their own. But is this kind of communication technology happening in most plants, or is it still just a dream? The truth is that many maintenance managers still use a document-based system as a method of data collection in their maintenance programmes. It is now possible to monitor a whole plant with the onlin condition monitoring technologiese.

Within the next three years, many plant managers plan to have analytical software, tablets, wireless connectivity for field workers, and predictive maintenance intelligence embedded in equipment from condition monitoring and vibration analysis solution providers.

We believe we are on the verge of a substantial change in predictive maintenance technologies. Based on improvements in technology and trends in the industry we are about to see a consolidation of predictive maintenance technologies. predictive maintenance technologies.  

Technologies are becoming less expensive in terms of the need for capital investment, and more capable and user-friendly in terms of hardware and software. The time has come to upgrade and make the switch for better results.

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