By using the latest condition monitoring systems and services, manufacturing companies can reduce unforeseen breakdowns. Schaeffler UK's managing director, Kate Hartigan, explains
When owning and managing high value items like cars or homes, most people are comfortable paying insurance premiums. So, surely manufacturing companies need to ensure their high value capital goods are adequately insured against unforeseen breakdowns? After all, lost production could equate to tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of pounds per day. Although the cost of machine components like bearings and motors is small compared with the total machine price, the cost of production downtime and consequential losses resulting from a component failure, are often significant.
Take a steel or aluminium manufacturing plant. The typical cost of production downtime is
Naturally, every manufacturing company has a maintenance department. However, due to time and resource constraints, the maintenance team may become reactive, fire fighting problems as they occur, with no predictive maintenance systems, little preventive maintenance and often no maintenance strategy at all.
There should be no excuses for this today. There are many technology safeguards which, when compared with the cost of lost production, are relatively inexpensive. More enlightened manufacturers are using condition monitoring and predictive maintenance systems, including bearing vibration monitoring, acoustic emissions monitoring and thermography, to protect plant and machines.
{mosimage}Schaeffler UK's managing director, Kate Hartigan, said: "Manufacturing or maintenance managers need to justify any expenditure on condition monitoring systems and services, to their finance director or MD. We would suggest using a risk management approach with questions like 'what will it cost the company in lost production if I lose that critical machine for five hours?"
One of the finance director's responsibilities is to ensure the company's assets are protected. Risk assessments should be carried out regularly to see what effect breakdowns would have on critical, bottleneck machines and equipment. The severity and likelihood of breakdowns on particular machines are assessed and given a corresponding risk value. Those with the highest risk scores are given priority by the maintenance team and should be protected by condition monitoring.
Companies can protect plant without condition monitoring or predictive maintenance systems by, for example, holding stock of components such as gearboxes and bearings. When a breakdown occurs, the component is immediately available. However, as Hartigan points out: "As well as the obvious increase in stock holding costs, the company also runs the risk of the stock deteriorating or becoming obsolete over time. We would recommend FAG ProCheck
