Digital Report: Maintenance & Safety

More data means more information about your manufacturing process, and more insights about machine health.

By Bob Vavra January 15, 2018

The recent Plant Engineering digital report, “Maintenance & Safety” offers a recap of the maintenance journey, which has been a long, slow trek for most manufacturers. It began with reactive manufacturing – what we call the “break-fix” mentality. It migrated to preventive maintenance, where work was done on a calendar schedule, and then to predictive maintenance, where the condition of the machine and its basic parts were monitored to understand their health, and parts replaced when performance began to deteriorate.

With the advent of the Industrial Internet of Things, more data means more information about your manufacturing process, and more insights about machine health. Today we’re on the cusp of prescriptive maintenance, where machines will tell workers when their performance begins to lag.

Not everything needs to be monitored in this way. In fact, Plant Engineering’s annual Maintenance Study, which you can review as part of this digital report, shows that it’s a combination of all these strategies, that are used in manufacturing today. The key is to have the insight and the experience to understand which assets are critical to your operation and need to be managed most carefully.

Bob Vavra is the Content Manager for Plant Engineering at CFE Media.


Author Bio: Bob is the Content Manager for Plant Engineering.