Dr. Watson Says: ...With all this new technology, it may be time to step up your preventative maintenance program ... What Do You Say? Click Here to Send Us Your Comments Click Here to See Reader Feedback

Preventative maintenance programs have been around a long time for good reason—they help drive down costs and prevent costly unexpected failures.

But, now, you have more like sensors on your equipment and in your facilities, you have better ways to store the data (like new open source Big Data storage systems), and you have better ways to analyze the data (new statistical methods and new machine learning algorithms).

With all this new technology, it may be time to step up your preventative maintenance program.  Especially, if you have expensive failures or if you are not getting as much out of your equipment as you think you should.

At a high level, predictive analytics helps you uncover previously hidden patterns in the data that indicate that a machine is about to fail.  It can find correlations that can help you make predictions.  For example, it could predict based on the vibration sensor that something is not aligned and that this pattern leads to a failure within 20 hours. 

Besides predicting failures, predictive analytics can also help you determine how to get the most out of your equipment.  For trucks, predictive analytics could predict how you can minimize fuel consumption by better driving patters.  For your manufacturing equipment, it could predict how to adjust the setting to get the best quality products.

Final Thoughts:

If you are collecting data on your equipment—your trucks, your warehouse picking equipment, your manufacturing equipment, you should think about using new analytics technology to see if you can reduce failures, improve equipment performance, or improve quality.