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M A I N T E N A N C E
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Machinery & Equipment MRO
December 2021
INDUSTRY 4.0 AND THE FUTURE OF MAINTENANCE The future of maintenance departments and the way they perform their maintenance activities are changing quickly, and technology is taking them in a completely new direction.
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ost of the people that read MRO magazine are on the front line of maintenance and have seen many great changes over the past number of years. COVID-19 has certainly changed the way we conduct our maintenance activities. There was a shortage of manpower with the virus spreading within the maintenance department and many facilities did not allow maintenance contractors
on site due to COVID-19 protocols. This created a major labour hour shortage and caused facilities to fall further behind on planned maintenance activities that included preventive maintenance, plant outages, equipment repairs, maintenance trainings, and the list goes on as critical activities were canceled or postponed. In general, this affected equipment reliability in a big way, and it made
companies think about the future, and prompted corporations to look closely at their maintenance strategies; to looks critically at maintenance regimes and to seek solutions that can predict equipment reliability without totally depending on the human intervention of trades people. Companies are turning to alternate ways to predict and perform maintenance for several reasons:
Photo: arrow / Adobe Stock
BY PETER PHILLIPS
