Predictive Maintenance
What is Predictive Maintenance
Predictive Maintenance is designed to measure the condition of equipment by performing periodic (offline) or continuous (online) monitoring of particular components and their failure characteristics. The predicted failure triggers a maintenance activity that should be such that it will bring the equipment back to its specified condition, in the shortest time.
Organisations who adopt a Predictive Maintenance Strategy will realise far greater benefits than simply a reduction in maintenance costs.
The benefits of Predictive Maintenance
If the assets do what they are supposed to do, at the time they are required to do it, whilst also providing optimal quality, the benefits could be:
A safe workplace
Improved effectiveness and efficiency (higher O.E.E.)
Improved services and outputs (that is, possible reduction in fines or penalties)
Improved product quality
Improved yield outputs
Reduced business risk
Reduced energy usage
Reduced material and parts inventory
Preventive Maintenance is the strategy that requires maintenance tasks to be carried out at predetermined intervals; in the majority of companies this is time based e.g. weekly, monthly etc. It can also be based on hours used e.g. every 1,000 hours or 10,000 miles. This strategy can result in an over maintenance or unnecessary maintenance situation, which is costly.
The fundamental difference between Preventive Maintenance and Predictive Maintenance is that preventive maintenance aims to prevent a failure based on a known failure pattern whilst Predictive Maintenance aims to identify a failure-based deviation from a known characteristic and the random nature of the failure.
The equipment condition will determine when restorative/repair maintenance is required and delivers savings over routine or time-based preventive maintenance because tasks are only performed when they are required.
Condition Monitoring and Predictive or Prescriptive Maintenance
Condition Monitoring is the monitoring of the various equipment component parameters to predict when a failure is likely to occur. This could be single or multiple parameters, could be online or offline or could be using gauges or periodical testing. This has often been a human activity collecting and analysing this data but is slowly becoming more and more automated.
Predictive Maintenance and Prescriptive Maintenance are two ways of using that Condition Monitoring data to decide when to carry out maintenance before the failure point.
To learn more about the definitions of Condition Monitoring, Predictive and Prescriptive Maintenance, download our White Paper - Understanding Terminology through our exclusive Members’ Area.
