Real-time condition monitoring is a powerful tool that can help maintenance and reliability professionals predict failures and mitigate production downtime seamlessly. Here are some steps that maintenance and reliability professionals can take to use real-time condition monitoring effectively:
- Identify critical equipment: Start by identifying the equipment that is most critical to your operation. This could be equipment that is expensive to replace, has a high impact on production, or poses safety risks if it fails.
- Define key performance indicators (KPIs): Define KPIs for each critical piece of equipment. These could include temperature, vibration, pressure, and other metrics that indicate the health of the equipment.
- Install sensors: Install sensors to monitor the KPIs in real-time. These sensors can be wired or wireless and can be connected to a central monitoring system.
- Use predictive analytics: Use predictive analytics to analyze the real-time data from the sensors. This can help identify patterns and trends that could indicate an impending failure.
- Implement automated alerts: Set up automated alerts that notify maintenance and reliability professionals when a KPI exceeds a certain threshold or when a trend indicates an impending failure. This can allow for proactive maintenance and repair before the equipment fails.
- Take corrective action: When an alert is triggered, take corrective action to prevent a failure. This could include repairing or replacing the equipment, adjusting the process, or implementing other measures to mitigate the risk of production downtime.
By implementing real-time condition monitoring and using predictive analytics to identify and prevent failures, maintenance and reliability professionals can reduce downtime, increase productivity, and improve the overall reliability of their equipment.
4M Analysis Process
The purpose of this procedure is to define the steps to do a 4M …
This ignores the fact that if all condition monitoring does is provide notification of failure, that reinforces reactive maintenance, which is wasteful.
In addition, in a typical production process, there are literally thousands of parts. On average, that could mean hundreds of notifications each day. That’s no way to deliver value-adding maintenance.
A better approach is to put in place practices that deliver zero breakdowns and use the data from sensors to optimise process effectiveness.