Category Archives: Maintenance

Avoiding Common Pitfalls in Industrial Machinery Maintenance

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Industrial machinery forms the backbone of many operations, and effective maintenance is crucial to keep it running smoothly. However, there are common mistakes that organizations make when it comes to maintenance, which can lead to downtime, increased costs, and safety risks. Let’s explore a few of these pitfalls and how to steer clear of them:

  1. Neglecting Regular Inspections and Maintenance: Regular check-ups and preventive maintenance are vital to catch potential issues before they escalate. Neglecting this can lead to unexpected breakdowns and higher repair costs.
  2. Lack of Documentation: Proper record-keeping of maintenance activities, repairs, and replacements is essential. Without accurate documentation, it’s challenging to track machine history and make informed decisions regarding maintenance strategies.
  3. Using Incorrect or Poor-Quality Parts: Opting for subpar or incorrect parts during maintenance can compromise the performance and longevity of machinery. Always choose high-quality, genuine parts to ensure optimal functioning.
  4. Overlooking Training and Skills Development: Skilled technicians are key to effective machinery maintenance. Investing in training and skill development programs ensures that your team is equipped to handle maintenance tasks efficiently and accurately.
  5. Ignoring Safety Protocols: Safety should be a top priority in any industrial setting. Failing to follow safety protocols during maintenance can lead to accidents or injuries, impacting both individuals and the organization.
  6. Not Planning for Downtime: Maintenance inevitably requires downtime. Failing to plan and communicate downtime schedules to relevant stakeholders can disrupt production and customer commitments.
  7. Underestimating Future Maintenance Needs: Industrial machines age and evolve, requiring adjustments in maintenance approaches. Failure to anticipate and plan for changing maintenance needs can lead to inefficiencies and increased costs.

Proper and regular calibration of industrial machinery plays a pivotal role in effective maintenance management. Calibration ensures that machinery operates within specified performance parameters, guaranteeing accurate readings and optimal functionality. By regularly calibrating equipment, you not only extend its lifespan but also enhance its reliability and precision. Moreover, calibrated machinery contributes to a safer work environment and compliance with industry regulations. Incorporating calibration into your maintenance regimen provides a proactive approach to identifying potential issues early on, enabling timely interventions and cost-effective solutions. It’s an investment that pays off by improving overall operational efficiency and reducing downtimes, ultimately leading to better outcomes for your organization.

Avoiding these common mistakes is crucial to maintaining an efficient, productive, and safe industrial environment. By prioritizing regular inspections, proper documentation, employee training, safety protocols, and strategic planning, organizations can ensure their machinery operates optimally, enhancing overall productivity and profitability.

#IndustrialMachinery #MaintenanceBestPractices #OperationalEfficiency #SafetyFirst

Introduction to Measurement and Calibration

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This course is intended for anyone using or calibrating measurement instruments, calibration coordinators, or for those responsible for maintaining quality. A thorough knowledge of measurement science is key to maintaining ISO quality standards. This course is designed to ensure that calibration terminology and practices are understood throughout the organization and especially by persons responsible for the contracting of calibration services. The course covers the basics to more advanced topics. 

Course Details:

  • Course Duration: 4 hours (9:00 am – 1:00 pm)
  • Date: April 25, 2019
  • Location: LCCI Building, Ikeja, Lagos, Nigeria

Learning Objectives:

  • Describe what metrology is, and what metrologists do.
  • Explain why measurement is important in our daily lives, commerce, product risk management, and international trade.
  • Contrast resolution, precision, and accuracy of a measurement system. Describe measurement uncertainty.
  • Describe the structure and use of a measurement system.
  • Describe different levels of standards and the requirements of traceability.
  • Explain the various components of a calibration system.
  • Describe the basic attributes of making good measurements.
  • Describe the units of measure and the various instruments used in various measurement parameters.

Who Should Attend:

This training will benefit all persons at any level using measurement instruments, including calibration coordinators, inspection personnel, and management; it can serve as a refresher for experienced technicians; or it can be used in orientation for new hires.

Course Outline:

  1. Introduction
    1. Definition of metrology
    2. Measurements in manufacturing
    3. Measurement in the global marketplace
    4. Importance of measurement
  2. Development and Concerns of Metrology
    1. Need for better measurements
    2. Determine and describe the differences between resolution, accuracy, precision, calibration, Type A uncertainty and Type B uncertainty
  3. Standards and Standardization
    1. Working standards, check standards and international standards
    2. Levels of standard accuracies, accuracy ratio between levels of calibration pyramid
    3. Requirements of traceability
    4. Metrology standardization documents
  4. Managing the Metrology System
    1. When a metrology system is needed
    2. Components of a metrology system
    3. Periodic calibration
    4. Determining period, fixed time intervals or other means, measurement assurance
    5. Record keeping
    6. Documented procedures
    7. Training
  5. Making Good Measurements: Elements of a Measurement System
    1. Measuring Instrument
    2. Measuring procedure
    3. Analysis of Measured data
    4. Measurement assurance
    5. Isolating errors
    6. Capability study
    7. Gage R & R
  6. Units and Measurement Instruments
    1. Length, height, optical, micrometers, metrology, etc.
    2. Time, Temperature, Flow, electrical quantities, etc.

The Benefits of a Predictive Maintenance Plan

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In the age of Industry 4.0 and the Industrial Internet of Things, plant maintenance has the potential to become less expensive and disruptive, and more insightful. To achieve these benefits, however, may require a change in how you maintain your plant’s equipment. 

Predictive Maintenance

There are four main ways you may currently be managing your plant’s equipment:

  1. Reactive maintenance – replacing parts only when machinery or equipment breaks.
  2. Proactive maintenance – identifying and addressing problems that lead to breakdowns.
  3. Preventive maintenance – maintaining equipment in good operating order to prevent breakdowns.
  4. Predictive maintenance – using inputs from connected machines and devices, remote monitoring, predictive analytics, and automated maintenance orders to predict when maintenance is necessary based. Predictive maintenance can also be done manually by periodically checking equipment with handheld vibration or audio sensors.

To help you determine how predictive maintenance can offer greater benefits and transform your plant’s operational costs, let’s start with an example that lets you weigh the costs and benefits of each maintenance approach. Ultimately, as you’ll see, it will be a combination of proactive, preventative, and predictive maintenance that will help you achieve the best results.

The Costs and Benefits of Reactive, Proactive, and Preventative Maintenance

Assume that somewhere in your plant right now, a bearing is going bad. How will your maintenance organization deal with it?

If your plant is like many, the first sign of an impending failure is a change in how the machine sounds, which an operator will often notice. Or assuming it’s a bushing that’s failing, the operator might see metal shavings. But if these signs go unnoticed, you may face catastrophe, as the part vibrates, heats up, or breaks. The typical response is reactive maintenance—where you call in a technician to restore equipment to its normal operating condition. Although costs are low until machine failure, the end result is that you incur a much greater expense for unexpected downtime. All the while, your backlog of orders is piling up. And, you may wait a long time for spare parts, unless you’ve stockpiled just the right ones.

With sufficient data, you may also be able to employ proactive maintenance to identify and address the problems that lead to breakdowns. For the bearing, the issues could be inappropriate lubrication, poorly aligned parts, or unfavorable environmental conditions. You’ll need to equip your plant with sensors or employ handheld products to locate areas where you might place sensors to supply data for a predictive or preventive plan. If you have the data to address root causes of parts failures, proactive maintenance can help prevent equipment failures and resulting downtime, disruption, and cost.

To move past the antiquated method of running equipment to failure, you may try to maximize uptime with preventive maintenance. You schedule maintenance based on time estimates for components from historical records or OEM recommendations. Although preventive maintenance is a step up from reactive maintenance, it also has some drawbacks. You may end up servicing and replacing good parts, while increasing downtime and disrupting operations to check equipment that’s running just fine. That’s where predictive maintenance can help.

The Value of Predictive Maintenance

With predictive maintenance, sensors can gather relevant, real-time data on the condition of the bearing. This information is then stored in a secure, cloud-based network that you can access at any time. Data from the sensor can be used to predict when you should perform proactive maintenance or preventative maintenance.

To minimize disruption, most predictive maintenance can be performed while equipment is operating. Machine-to-human communication and data analytics give you insight into performance levels without manual routine check-ups.

In recent years, costs have decreased on technologies such as sensors, computing power, data storage, and bandwidth, allowing even smaller organizations to get started with predictive maintenance. Still, outfitting your plant requires an initial investment that can be intimidating. But, there’s good news. Although entry level costs may be high, you can expect to see a 10X return on investment in predictive maintenance within the first two years and a reduction in maintenance costs of 25 to 30 percent according to the U.S. Department of Energy. A study by the Enterprise Strategy Group found that unplanned downtime for the average manufacturing plant can cost $30,000 to $50,000 per hour.