Predicting the future can save cost

More than ever before, businesses are investing heavily in digital tools and technologies that help them leverage data to generate valuable insights. In the manufacturing world, predictive maintenance (PdM) is at the forefront of this technology movement and represents the strongest solution to the persistent manufacturing challenge of unplanned downtime. Pipes, Pumps and Valves Africa find out more.

Technology solutions are usually introduced for two reasons – to improve productivity and to impact positively on profitability. Many companies, however, still struggle to realise the full value of these solutions, says Bharat Vats, Chief Revenue Officer at Novity. He says it is important to understand that not all PdM solutions are created equal and several factors need to be considered when introducing these solutions into an operation. His advice is to look for a solution that is firstly highly accurate. “Predictions that are often 90% and more than three months ahead of a failure, even when little failure data exists, is what you should be looking for. Just as important is always-on, real-time decision support that informs users when a piece of critical equipment will fail thus reducing unplanned downtime and its negative consequences.” The biggest benefit of a PdM is that these solutions allow operations teams to focus on meeting production goals and not be focused on large-scale data management and maintenance regimes. “Over the past five decades there has been an evolution of maintenance programmes,” he says. “It started with interval-based maintenance practices where maintenance was scheduled based on the breakdown of equipment. This was highly uncertain and came with significant costs.” As developments took place industry moved wards failure and reliability statistics on many assets instead of introducing a reliability-centred maintenance approach that allowed for maintenance to be planned somewhat better and for costs to be controlled. “The system still was not perfect and we saw the development of conditionbased maintenance. This is where monitoring, data analysis and diagnostics came into play along with the ability to determine when the equipment would fail.’ “The problem, however, was that the operation team still did not know why it was failing, when it would happen again or where the cause was.” This, says Vats, is where PdM’s are making a difference. “Industry 4.0 has moved the industry from a vision to reality. With predictive analytics, prognostics and the like, prescriptive maintenance can now take place,” he says. “Digitization is enabling more efficient plant operations than ever before. Plant operators are using