A salesman, an engineer and a maintenance technician from the manufacturing industry are together in a car on their way to a conference. Then one of the car’s tires bursts. The three get out of the car and look at each other questioningly.
The salesman has an idea: “Maybe I should go into town and get us a new tire. I know that I can negotiate with the man in the shop and save us money.”
The engineer replied: “No, before you do that we have to do some calculations to determine the road quality, the asphalt temperature and the average speed we will travel to know what kind of tyres you should buy”.
The technician laughs and shakes his head. “No, no, no, no, no! What’s the problem with you guys? Damn, we got a spare tyre in the trunk. Now we just have to start changing all the tyres one by one until we find the flat one!”
As long as it runs, nothing has to be done
Most of you would agree with the following statement: If you perform your preventive or predictive maintenance correctly, you never have to shut down your machines for corrective maintenance – at least not due to component failure or wear parts. If preventive maintenance is performed properly, faulty components will be found before they fail. That in itself is a considerable advantage. But preventive maintenance can do even more. In industry, especially in metal processing plants, well maintained machines are safe machines that provide a safe environment for their operators. In this article we show you that maintenance with the right MySolutions software has many more advantages.
The most important thing first: You save money
It’s that simple. Preventive maintenance may seem expensive, but it actually works a bit like health insurance: routine care extends average life expectancy. And if there really is a problem, the costs are lower. Why wait for problems to occur instead of preventing the worst by checking your processes as a precaution? In terms of manufacturing, the benefits are obvious: if you avoid problems, the production lines will never stop completely and you will meet your deadlines. Not only will your employees be happier, but they will be working at a safer workplace.
Monitoring and predictive maintenance increase operational reliability
If a necessary preventive maintenance measure is not carried out, something will eventually fail on the machine. Let’s compare this to driving a car. If you never carry out maintenance on the car, for example replacing fluids, filters, tyres or brakes, something will fail at some point. Would you like to be the one to drive the car when the time comes? While you would never consider treating your car this way, you would be surprised if you knew how many manufacturing companies have such a negligent attitude to their CNC machines. Neglecting predictive maintenance means compromising the safety of everyone, whether team members or customers. Let’s not forget in this context the recording of cyclic or one-off intervals with an electronic signature. This provides a company with the necessary legal security. A higher security means a higher reliability and the in turn…
… improves production efficiency
We all know that overall efficiency in a manufacturing operation depends on three factors: performance, quality and availability. A lack of proper maintenance can undermine all these factors:
1. performance as production or set-up times gradually slow down;
2. quality, for example through an increase in defective units;
3. availability in the event of equipment failure and increased downtime.
So you can see how important maintenance is to ensure that everything works at full capacity. This in turn leads to cost reductions, more revenue and more satisfied customers.
Use a modern CMMS to optimize your maintenance
To support you in implementing your predictive maintenance plan, you can use maintenance software such as MyXPert Monitoring from MySolutions. Our software helps you to improve your maintenance routines daily and includes a user-friendly interface including mobile application, a fast and innovative search, calendar function and warnings, intervention reports, document management, an analysis tool, preventive maintenance plans and much more. In addition, the software easily connects to any ERP or other intelligent system, including sensors, to help you create reliable predictive analyses.
Interested in optimizing your maintenance processes and learning more about how to increase productivity, cut costs and generate customer benefits? Then give us a call and let us advise you. We promise you that at the other end there will be neither a technician nor an engineer or even a salesman.