Smooth operations through IoT preventive maintenance
Preventative maintenance is a key component of asset management. Future-facing businesses are implementing smart technologies and IoT preventive maintenance practices to get their maintenance schedules running like a well-oiled machine. In this blog, we take preventive maintenance back to basics, covering definitions and benefits. Keep reading to find out how smart technology and predictive maintenance software are boosting productivity and providing advanced benefits for business owners and managers.
What is preventive vs corrective maintenance?
Let’s take a look at the definition of preventive vs corrective maintenance. Corrective maintenance is reactive. Corrective maintenance takes place only once a machine or piece of equipment starts malfunctioning or, even worse, stops working altogether. Preventive maintenance is a system of scheduled maintenance with the aim of keeping machinery in good, constant working order.
Some of the hallmarks of corrective maintenance include urgent call-outs by maintenance teams, a disruption to operations, the cost of downtime in monetary and reputational terms, the often high cost of repairs, collateral damage, and an increased burden on staff and resources to get back up to speed. This underscores the importance of preventive maintenance, which both removes these issues and has additional benefits such as increased energy efficiency and value retention of assets.
What is planned preventative maintenance?
Planned preventative maintenance is a schedule of maintenance that is strategically devised avoid systems failures rather than react to them. They are in place to keep machinery running smoothly – even when it is functioning normally. This gives business owners and managers the ability to manage planned downtime, rather than emergency downtime.
What Is Total Preventive Maintenance?
Total preventive maintenance makes routine maintenance the responsibility of the machinery operator (rather than a third-party or independent maintenance team). Total preventive maintenance includes both corrective and preventive maintenance.
Asset management & failing to plan
The main problem with corrective maintenance is that it often has the effect of stopping operations in their tracks. When critical equipment goes down:
- It affects the quality of goods and services
- It impacts deliverables
- It can be resource-intensive and costly to rectify
- It affects reputation and profitability
Additionally, maintenance affects the lifespan and performance of key assets. When it comes to equipment that’s central to performance, replacement can lead to expensive downtime and high replacement costs.
Smart technologies are giving businesses the opportunity to use data to drive maintenance schedules. This not only removes the worry around these kinds of equipment failures, but serves to optimise performance too. Real-time building monitoring gives business owners and managers a unique ability to react to early indicators to mitigate the chance of defects and failures.
How Tomorrow’s Planned Preventative Maintenance Companies Create Intelligent Maintenance Schedules
In a rapidly digitalising world, the asset management of tomorrow relies increasingly on data to guide processes and productivity of key equipment. In the past, businesses typically adopted policies of corrective or reactive maintenance – or maintenance cycles that include a margin of randomness and elements of human error.
To remain competitive, businesses of all sizes are using smart technologies and IoT preventive maintenance to guide schedules and boost profits. The power of these smart solutions lies in their simplicity. By collecting real-time data from on-the-ground operations, less is left to chance and opportunities for automation and optimised processes are created.
The system of tags and sensors, like those from Smarter Technologies Group, report on your selection of metrics. This could include anything from atmospheric changes, vibrations, or number of hours of operation to automated water temperature reporting for Legionella testing. All data is reported and stored on a remotely accessible, cloud-based dashboard for internal record-keeping and compliance reporting.
IoT preventive maintenance is a commitment to asset performance and longevity, operator safety, and operational excellence. Whether you are devising schedules alongside external maintenance companies or guiding a total preventive maintenance culture, your operational data reduces the need for reactive, corrective maintenance and associated stress and costs.
Keep reading for key takeaways and insights into the smarter world of IoT preventative maintenance.
The benefits of data-inspired preventative maintenance
Extended lifespan of systems
Preventive maintenance serves to keep equipment in top-top shape. In so doing, you are also working towards extending the longevity of machinery.
Enhanced energy efficiency
Regular maintenance has the potential to keep machinery working efficiently, with reduced energy consumption and emissions. This has benefits for your business’s bottom line, green goals, and contributes to overall workplace safety.
Increased productivity
By keeping machines running smoothly, you empower productivity. Regularly maintained machinery is more likely to achieve optimal outputs – and improved productivity means improved profitability.
Reduced maintenance costs and clever budgeting
Emergency maintenance can be extremely costly. By carefully formulating a preventive maintenance schedule, businesses stand to drastically reduce maintenance costs.
Removing the cost of getting back up to speed
Unscheduled downtime has a knock-on effect. To get back on track and effectively manage deliverables to clients and customers often requires staff overtime, extra administration, and careful management. Uninterrupted operations and a system of planned downtime means reduced business disruption and the effects of this.
Compliance and safety
Equipment monitored for the purposes of compliance often place a heavy administrative burden on businesses. Manual processes require manpower, which goes in-hand with the risk of human error and the cost of non-compliance. Smart technologies create automated processes for everything from fire safety compliance, Legionella monitoring, and lone worker safety to noise exposure, vibrations, and emissions. IoT tags, sensors, and pressure pads also catalogue and store consistently acquired data on a remotely accessible dashboard, removing the need for filing cabinets and human processes.
Optimised schedules
While failure to perform maintenance is a worry, it is also costly to be over-cautious. One of the big benefits of smart technologies and preventive maintenance is the ability to fine-tune maintenance schedules based on real-time data. This means every maintenance process will be optimised, which has the effect of saving money and preventing waste.
Contractual obligations
Many commercial tenancy contracts include clauses around occupant safety and the good repair of the property. A planned preventative maintenance plan works to achieve this.
A smart system of sensors and tags to guide planned preventative maintenance
Data-inspired innovations are coming to define maintenance of the future. IoT-driven sensors and tags give business owners and managers an opportunity to monitor their entire operations remotely and in real time – from anywhere. This gives actionable insights when it comes to machinery, as well as the kind of data that informs strategic decision-making in the long term.
Many smart technologies are also easily integrable within existing asset management systems and predictive maintenance software. This makes them a simple addition for superior outcomes. It also creates an opportunity for automation, which is the guiding businesses of the future.
The smarter way to work towards preventative maintenance
Smarter Technologies Group offers simple, powerful technologies for digital transformation around maintenance. Servicing a range of industries and sectors, these solutions are highly effective in achieving digital transformation around maintenance of key machinery.
Contact Smarter Technologies Group today for more information and tailored advice on the future of IoT preventive maintenance in your business.