Is a digital approach suitable for all companies?
Maintenance and reliability improvement is never an end in itself, it is a journey that continues and never ends. Many maintenance and reliability managers in their industries often ask to benchmark and evaluate their maintenance processes and practices with them, always to cover three basic objectives:
- Safety and compliance.
- Availability of production tools.
- Reduction of production and maintenance costs.
In other words, to produce more sustainably with fewer resources while ensuring optimum safety of personnel and production tools in accordance with the legislation and standards of the industry segment in which the company operates. These are not new pressures on the maintenance team, but many of these organisations still do not know how to solve these problems in a structured way and make the necessary improvements.
One of the biggest misunderstandings you see when visiting manufacturing plants is the reluctance to change or try something different or new. It is said that the seven most cherished words in maintenance are "we have always done it this way".
In contrast, and perhaps paradoxically, a 'hype' topic of conversation in recent months has been the developments and opportunities around Industry 4.0, the IIOT (industrial internet of things) and the digitisation of decision-making processes to achieve the objectives described above. Often, initiatives in this area are rejected or limited to pilot projects by company or group management, without much understanding of what they mean or imply. In fact, it is not often well understood that companies today need a strategy in a digital world and not just a digital strategy in the current and still often analogue industrial world. But this paradigm shift takes time and the strategic questions surrounding it are legitimate.
A well-structured digital strategy is undoubtedly the way forward for mature or successful maintenance and reliability teams, with the obvious link to operational efficiency. But what about less mature maintenance companies? Should they believe in the saving quantum leap and explore and try these 'new approaches' by making the leap from 2.0 directly to 4.0? Or should they first improve their maintenance fundamentals? Let's remember, nothing new here, that unplanned maintenance costs 3 to 5 times more than planned maintenance and takes at least 5 times longer to perform.
For many, but not all, companies, a network of connected sensors, linked to the cloud and machine learning and prognostic software, will not necessarily provide the value they are looking for if the basics of maintenance are not sufficiently present. If you don't install your machines correctly, lubricate them properly and perform the necessary preventive maintenance routines, the chances of unexpected early damage to the expected life are high. So before a maintenance team starts using its valuable and often limited resources to try to implement a new digital strategy, it may be best to ensure that your existing maintenance approach and practices are aligned with the needs of the future digitally connected world.
However, when you meet the right company and maintenance team who are mature enough in their processes and practices - who have successfully implemented a structured maintenance strategy and have a robust reliability programme to eliminate defects - then you can see how a digital approach will add real value to their business. Digitalisation has the potential to improve both the effectiveness and efficiency of daily routines, while creating a clear link to improving reliability, through machine learning and prognostics.
In such companies, it is often the maintenance and reliability teams that push these initiatives to senior management. And this same management can thank its maintenance ambassadors, because let's remember that the best companies actually implement and achieve what others talk about doing.
Laurent Vanhoudenhove
Managing Director Industrial Market Benelux SKF
laurent.vanhoudenhove@skf.com
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