Industrial maintenance: weapon of massive competitiveness for productivity

After the cyberattack, the temporary shutdown of a production link due to a breakdown represents the worst fear of an industrialist. Industrial maintenance has contributed for nearly half a century to ensuring continuity of production in companies . While maintenance historically consisted of repairing, troubleshooting, checking and dealing with the most urgent to limit costs, the industry of the future takes industrial maintenance into a new dimension: anticipation . Prevention is better than cure applies as much to health as to industry. From corrective maintenance to proactive maintenance through predictive maintenance, find out how CMMS will revolutionize your industry .

What is industrial maintenance?

Definition of industrial maintenance

In the past, industrial maintenance within a company consisted of ensuring the repairs essential to the proper functioning of production . Technical tools and digitalization now make it possible to prevent breakdowns with such precision that maintenance costs are reduced while production is almost uninterrupted.

Industrial maintenance is a key step in the production process, because it avoids the slowing down or stopping, even temporary, of manufacturing .

Evolution of industrial maintenance

The industry of the future is changing industrial maintenance so that repair or overhaul operations become almost non-existent thanks to predictive or proactive maintenance. The objective: that the downtime that causes a great loss of productivity is reduced or even eliminated .

The state in which the equipment undergoing maintenance must be kept is defined upstream by the experts in the field.

How has the field of industrial maintenance evolved with the advent of industry 4.0?

The beginnings: corrective maintenance

Corrective maintenance repairs while maintenance of the future announces . A well-informed industrialist who anticipates a breakdown gains in efficiency instead of suffering the vagaries of technology.

Evolution: preventive maintenance

Preventive maintenance , as the name suggests, occurs before interruption to minimize the degradation of parts or components of an equipment. The objective is not to wait for the shutdown to act, in order to reduce the costs and the scale of the intervention.

The digitization of preventive maintenance makes it possible to obtain highly reliable real-time information . The work of the maintenance operators is facilitated, because the interventions no longer take place in an emergency. They are planned and carried out under better conditions than a repair essential to restarting a production line.

The future: proactive maintenance

The next step towards proactive maintenance has been achieved with artificial intelligence, which makes it possible to enter the era of anticipation and interoperability , which consists of connecting equipment to each other. By analyzing machine usage data and various key performance indicators, malfunctions are predicted even more reliably.

A breakdown is inevitable with the wear of parts, it has nothing to do with a maintenance or quality problem, but predictive maintenance knows it and anticipates it.

The main advantage of proactive maintenance consists in ensuring the intervention as soon as possible before the breakdown . Thus, the number of checks and maintenance is reduced while guaranteeing uninterrupted operation of the equipment.

The final advantage of the maintenance of the future is that it does not necessarily require human intervention compared to repair. The time saving is considerable. Costs are reduced and human skills are used to their full extent for more complex tasks than repair. The industry of the future brings value to your business .

What are the advantages of industrial maintenance 4.0?

Today, industrial maintenance represents a real strategic function of the industry of tomorrow to meet financial challenges, of course, but also safety and the environment . A machine whose failure is predicted corresponds to safer equipment whose end of life and recycling will also be better managed. The industry wins all the way.

The technologies of the future do not seek to improve the management of breakdowns, but rather to avoid them. For information, industries engaged in proactive maintenance record a reduction in corrective maintenance interventions of up to 50% . The result is a reduction in maintenance costs and storage volumes while the equipment operates without interruption and without breakdowns. However, the failure rate is not zero, because perfection does not yet exist, even with the industry of the future.

How will CMMS be the future of industrial maintenance?

What is CMMS?

With a view to reducing costs and lead times, while improving the quality of services, Computer Aided Maintenance Management, or CMMS , represents a digital tool integrated into the industrial operations computer system.

A preventive and predictive maintenance tool, it facilitates the work of maintenance teams while offering an overall view that an operator would find difficult to obtain on the basis of his knowledge and analyzes alone.

By improving the quality of maintenance operations, your company further reduces the risk of downtime in the event of equipment failure.

Why does CMMS improve all your processes?

The CMMS ensures the maintenance of all your industry (equipment, buildings, machines, etc.) in accordance with the state defined beforehand.

Your profitability increases, your maintenance costs decrease and your serenity increases durably . You no longer fear that a malfunction will disrupt your production and delivery schedules. You offer a better level of satisfaction to your customers who trust you and are never disappointed.

Predictive industrial maintenance not only makes it possible to anticipate repairs, it provides benefits at several stages of the management of your industry:

• Organize mandatory preventive and curative operations
• Ensure precise monitoring of spare parts stocks
• Integrate the renewal of equipment reaching the end of its life into the provisional budget
• Follow the key maintenance indicators essential to the proper functioning of your processes

How does CMMS increase your decision-making power?

By anticipating and having the time necessary to schedule a renewal of equipment, you have all the cards in hand to choose the supplier or the model that best meets your expectations . You are no longer vulnerable and forced to comply with the demands of your partners to continue your production.

If a machine in your production line needs to be replaced within six months, why not think about better equipment? Preventive maintenance offers a major asset in the management of your business: time . Making a decision or making a purchase in haste to deal with the most urgent is undoubtedly less profitable than having the time to choose the best solution. Not in a hurry, you also have the opportunity to play the competition to obtain the most interesting rates .

How to lead your company towards proactive industrial maintenance?

The facilities of an industry are inspected at regular intervals to ensure the proper functioning of the entire production chain.

Industry 4.0 seeks to anticipate breakdowns and must therefore collect reliable and relevant data on the condition of equipment and infrastructure. Companies specializing in the subject are being created and help manufacturers manage this aspect of their process , which is as crucial as cybersecurity or the integration of the Internet of Things. The tools they develop make it possible to ensure monitoring for effective predictive and even proactive maintenance.

The correct transmission of alerts when equipment enters a critical operating zone is essential. Precise settings are required to avoid unnecessary interventions, as well as to anticipate breakdowns.

How does preventive maintenance put people back at the center of the debate?

Computer-assisted maintenance management promotes the sharing of vital information from your various departments within a common dialogue database .

Most of your employees are affected by proactive maintenance:

• The production operators give their feedback on the use of the machines: speed, reliability, quality, etc.
• Maintenance technicians provide feedback on the state of the machines during the last maintenance missions to verify the concordance between reality and the data obtained in real time by the tools
• Purchasing managers rely on data transmitted by their colleagues in the field to plan the ordering of spare parts
• Inventory managers organize themselves in relation to the next deliveries, aware that only what is necessary is waiting in your factories. You optimize your spaces, you further reduce your costs

The CMMS opens the doors to a new way of collaborating within the company . Some fear that the machine will one day replace the human, but preventive maintenance leads more to notions of collaboration, agreement and transmission of knowledge from human to human .

Scientists, technicians, maintenance and production managers, these trades which never met before now cooperate closely to understand each other's expectations and develop industrial maintenance tools that meet everyone's needs. The industry of the future replaces exchanges in the operation of companies , because without people and their feedback, data and technology cannot be exploited to their full extent.