How can technology help with reliability centered maintenance?
So, like most businesses these days, when it comes to your maintenance, you do what is known as either reliability centered maintenance, reliability based maintenance. This is, in a nutshell, scheduling maintenance on a regular basis to ensure continued reliability of your assets and equipment, but also in tracking incidents and breakdowns to prevent catastrophic failure out of the blue. While this may sound like a “no duh” approach to maintenance, it’s actually a fairly novel concept with the reliability aspect being so central to scheduling tracking of various things.
It’s not so novel that it hasn’t been tried back in history, but only with modern computing is it really been that possible to achieve on a regular basis, let alone an effective regular basis. The problem is, tracking all of this stuff in a time before computers at all was basically impossible, with handwriting being eligible for one person to the next, people overlooking paperwork due to being busy, and the impossibility of automation of the sort of thing without some sort of device handling the information.
Technology to aid this isn’t it self actually knew either, though this being a standard de facto approach is what’s truly new. See, before modern computing, by that I mean the technology of the past 15 years or so, this sort of software had to be very bespoke, and the systems it ran on were themselves at least somewhat bespoke. Only really large companies could afford to have this done, and because of the complicated nature of computers at the time as well as the lack of general computer literacy among most people, there had to be a lot of training, and it was very limited in its abilities even when used properly.
Today, we live in a world where literal supercomputers exist in people’s pockets, fortified, small machines of incredible capability can be placed of any work area, and it can all pretty much run itself aside from when a human is needed to either perform a task is calling for, or information into it. Thanks to this, as well as large, robust databases, maintenance can be enforced on a granular level, and repeated incidents or necessary unscheduled maintenance can automatically trigger predictions that a piece of equipment is about to go faulty, potentially in a catastrophic way.
It’s pretty obvious that reliability centered maintenance and the software to support it can save you a ton of money in preventative maintenance, keeping entire workflows from having to grind to a halt until new equipment is either ordered, or existing equipment goes through troubleshooting. However, reliability maintenance like this also can save a lot of lives, and prevent a lot of injuries. Imagine how many lives have been saved in old Industrial Revolution accidents had they had this kind of technology at the time!
These days, there are a variety of implementations for this, be it software as a service, local installations or something that is even hybridized between them, so there is guaranteed to be an implementation of the sort of maintenance scheduling and analytics software needs your budget, your infrastructure and your corporate culture. Remarkably little training will be necessary of the related staff to operate complied with the software, and some of it can even learn to comply with the people rather than the other way around! This truly is an age where industrial workspaces can be so much safer simply thanks to instructions on a microchip. And they say that the wonder is gone out of innovation, or that it never existed in the corporate environment.