What's the easiest way to start a predictive maintenance program?

Start with your most critical piece of equipment, track information related to failures, and set up alerts to generate work orders to prevent major breakdowns. By following these three simple steps on a small scale, your facility will be able to see significant results quickly.

Once you complete this process in one area of your facility, you can easily add to your predictive maintenance program to realize even more significant results. According to recent studies, predictive maintenance can reduce potential failures and maintenance costs by 12 percent per year. Here are the details on how to do it.

Analyze, Rank, and Prioritize Critical Failures

In order to prevent breakdowns, you must understand the failures on your critical assets, where they come from, and their impact. One popular tool is called the ABC analysis, which can be used to rank three factors on a 10-point scale. By assigning a number to frequency of failures, how hard it is to detect the failure, and what the failure’s impact is on your overall operations, you can generate a risk priority number.

Schedule more frequent inspections and detailed checks on those critical machines that are more prone to failure to reduce downtime.

Create Ongoing Data Streams

Once you’ve identified your critical equipment, you’ll want to understand exactly where the failures are originating. A wide number of sensors are now available to monitor everything from humidity to temperature to vibration. They are dropping in cost and improving in quality with each passing day, making them a great extra set of eyes for your facility.

Predictive maintenance software can use sensor alerts along with artificial intelligence to project patterns that may help catch major breakdowns before they occur, saving you potentially thousands of dollars.

Notify Maintenance Team for Action

As soon as your established thresholds are reached on certain sensors or other data collection systems, your CMMS can automatically generate a work order for maintenance technicians or flag maintenance supervisors to take appropriate action. Ar this point, all the data entered into your system becomes available and provides the foundation to make the best maintenance decisions possible.