Photo credit: One Prod
How complicated is to handle maintenance of rotating machinery?
The answer may vary depending on below aspects.
How critical is the machine to business activities?
When the machine is not really critical for our production process, and when the machine downtime will not affect out production capacity, then this will not be a so big issue to handle. But when the machine is very critical to your production process, and when short downtime of the machine will create significant loss to company, then maintaining this machine may become challenging.
Size of machine
When the machine we have to support the production process, has relatively small size, then likely it may not take long period to perform corrective maintenance. It may not be big issue also for maintenance team to have stock on critical spare part. Therefore, the machine downtime may not be significant. But when our machine has relatively large size, then the corrective maintenance may take longer period, and also it will take some time to get a replacement part from the manufacturer, especially when having spare part on stock is not a cost effective option.
Number of machines
When we have just one critical machine, then scheduling a preventive maintenance may not be big issue. But when we have many critical machines, scheduling a preventive maintenance likely may become more complicated.
Photo credit: One Prod
For rotating machineries, maintenance strategies can be classified into below categories:
Corrective Maintenance
The simplest type of maintenance strategy, which just perform maintenance activities when the failure observed. There are no planned activities in this type of maintenance. This type of maintenance activity may lead to very long machine downtime, due to lead time of replacement part and/or the duration of maintenance itself. This type of maintenance strategy can be implemented to non-critical machine which is not causing significant loss due to its downtime.
Preventive Maintenance
This type of maintenance strategy conducts scheduled maintenance activities with specific periodicity. These maintenance activities will be performed disregard of health condition of the machine itself and the machine will be routinely dis-assembled. The periodicity is commonly determined based on the mean time between failure analysis result. But unlike corrective maintenance, the preventive maintenance activities may be aligned to production plan and can be scheduled during low production period.
Predictive Maintenance
Unlike preventive maintenance that performs scheduled maintenance disregard of machine health condition, this type of maintenance strategy will only conduct maintenance activities when machine health condition is already beyond acceptable level. Instead of conducting scheduled maintenance, this type of maintenance strategy conducts scheduled machine health monitoring activities. These activities may include deploying sensors, collecting vibration data, collecting temperature data, oil analysis, etc.
Photo credit: One Prod
Which maintenance strategy is suitable for our machine, will be depending on below factors:
Critical or non-critical machine
Applicable or not applicable to perform health monitoring
Cost justification
Predictive maintenance CMS3
Benefits of using Predictive Maintenance:
Ability to identify potential failure at early stage and minimize the probability of unexpected failures, which will lead to minimized production loss.
By identifying potential failure in advance, probability of secondary damage can also be reduced.
Reduce maintenance cost, since maintenance activities (machine dis-assembly and parts replacement) will be done only when needed.
Less maintenance activities will lead also to less inventory cost, since need less part replacements and its order can be scheduled only when needed.
