Why use Predictive Maintenance?

Unscheduled maintenance is painful for you, your engineers and your business. Your customers feel the brunt of this problem, as increased downtime leads to lower satisfaction. Predictive Maintenance techniques help you avoid this unnecessary cost through understanding your equipment failure horizon in advance – allowing you to schedule in maintenance when it works for you and your customer.

Increasing pressure on timelines, supply chains and profit margins have brought the Reactive Maintenance problem to the forefront. Industry simply cannot continue to rely on servicing as and when mission critical equipment breaks. Additionally, increasing pressure is being applied on Preventive Maintenance strategies as servicing in a regular cadence uses up unnecessary resources, especially if servicing was not required for system performance.

And Industry knows this. PdM Methods are being used to reduce stock laydown in industries where small modular replaceable units are common, such as:

• Medical Robotics
• Additive Manufacturing

It's also being used to minimise downtime in the Oil and Gas industries, resulting in millions of $'s in savings. Predictive maintenance is industries' well kept secret that is helping it save millions yearly; and this is a conservative estimate.

Reduce your Costs

Where are the largest maintenance costs in your business? Starting the journey to a predictive maintenance strategy will by necessity help you answer this question. Through identifying the large cost expenditures, and therefore cost reduction targets, you will form a suite of requirements that form the foundation of your predictive maintenance strategy. Predixus is the market leader in helping you understand the critical business requirements for a predictive maintenance solution that will help solve your largest servicing problems.

Through the application of Predictive Maintenance, the instantaneous service cost liability can be decreased while increasing system reliability. A reliable Predictive Maintenance strategy would give you the confidence to service at the right time for your businesses given the current operating expenses.

Predictive Maintenance also enables tailored servicing, by determining from real time data the required servicing action to recover factory performance. Through this approach, PdM enables the minimal necessary force required to keep your assets operating.

Further cost saving measures enabled by Predictive Maintenance are:

• Reduction of Spare Part production, decreasing your stock liability
• Reduction of Spare Part utilisation due to increased failure mode visibility
• Reduced downtime of equipment during operation – schedule maintenance through natural usage cycles

Optimise your Operations

There is a broad range of other benefits that are unlocked by a robust Predictive maintenance strategy. Here are some to name a few:

• Optimised fleet utilisation
• Failure mode identification
• Optimised asset allocation
• Gain scheduling improvements

Using Predictive Maintenance to optimise fleet usage is an advanced technique that is employed after a robust predictive maintenance strategy is already in place. Fleet optimization can help you in several ways. For example:

• Moving the operation of fleet systems that are within a failure horizon closer to service centres
• Avoiding further degradation of systems beyond a failure point through alternate utilisation

Additionally, through the sufficient monitoring and analysis of your fleet data, you can extract failure mode information which can be used to inform design changes.

Gain a Competitive Edge

Predictive Maintenance turns urgent problems into manageable ones ahead of time. It's for this reason that industries across the board are utilising PdM techniques to maximise cost savings, passing them on to the customer. Increased utilisation of Industry 4.0 technologies (the IIoT) are also making industry awash with data. A natural progression for many industries is to realise value from this data in the form of predictive maintenance. Doing so will not only help you save time and money, but also give you that competitive edge at little relative cost.

Core utilisations of Predictive Maintenance principles will set you ahead of your competitors in the domain of customer satisfaction. Preempting system failures and scheduling in the repair work around your customers usage patterns will only accelerate your customer satisfaction ratings. Providing operational excellence in this way is a tried and tested method to improving customer relations and overall satisfaction.