Leverage Industrial IoT to Make the Move to Predictive Maintenance

If there’s one constant since the beginning of organized production, it’s the urgency to maximize uptime and churn out the highest-quality products at the fastest possible speed. No matter how sophisticated, targeted, or unique the business strategy, manufacturers are at a competitive disadvantage if their production lines can’t deliver. Predictive maintenance is the answer.

While all manufacturing leaders—especially operations and plant managers—understand the crucial role maintenance plays in making things, many may be unaware that their approach to maintenance is fast becoming obsolete. New methods, powered by the Industrial Internet of Things (IoT), are already beginning to shatter maintenance norms and benchmarks.

Most maintenance professionals know that the legacy approaches of reactive or scheduled (aka preventative) maintenance can’t keep up with the demands of a 21st-century manufacturing marketplace. Industrial IoT-based predictive maintenance solutions simplify the transition from earlier maintenance methods by facilitating the seamless connection of all factory assets and enabling a centralized view of real-time performance and health.

Often confused with preventative or scheduled maintenance, predictive maintenance leverages industrial IoT capabilities to identify more precisely when equipment requires maintenance – as close to failure as possible – to get maximum uptime and reduce maintenance costs. Predictive maintenance uses data gathered from IoT-connected equipment continuously over time and provides a far more precise trend profile based on performance. Data is collected as the equipment is running, so it doesn’t need to be taken offline.

As the Industrial IoT becomes mainstream, companies that fail to implement IoT-based prescriptive maintenance capabilities will be unable to meet the new industrial maintenance benchmark: zero unplanned downtime. To remain competitive, companies must optimize asset performance and minimize failure, as even brief periods of downtime can result in reduced revenue, excessive overhead and strained resources.

Now just beginning to be implemented, prescriptive maintenance solutions take predictive maintenance to the next level and offer the ability to resolve issues automatically by prescribing and deploying efficient solutions based on previous maintenance data.

Manufacturers that want to ensure that their hard-won competitive advantage isn’t lost to more savvy and nimble competitors that raise their plant efficiency to unheard-of levels should take note and start leveraging IoT-based predictive maintenance to achieve the benchmark of zero downtime.