ELLWOOD

BishwajitRanjan

After having experienced the pace of technological revolution in the last few decades of the 20th century and the continued trend in the 21st century, we can confidently say the impact of technology and its proliferation is beyond our expectations. During the 1990s, when I was pursuing my Mechanical Engineering in BIT’s Ranchi, India, I always wondered how the Indian government would manage the challenge of laying millions of miles of telephone lines in rural India to connect to its billions of people and then-boom!! -The advent of the Mobile phone and its expansion at lightning speed eliminated the need for laying telephone lines altogether. The Apollo11 mission to the moon in 1969 that saw the first-ever moonwalk by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took 51 hours and 49 minutes reaching the moon, while today’s Orion’s mission with a speed of 20000 mph can zip to the moon just in 12 hrs. In the 21st century, the Advancement in Technology has impacted every sphere of life, and our manufacturing world is no exception. As put very aptly by famous business guru and author John Naisbitt,

 “The most exciting breakthroughs of the 21st century will not occur because of technology but because of an expanding concept of what it means to be human” – John Naisbitt.

 Today’s manufacturing industry is going through the 4th Industrial revolution (Industry 4.0), where productivity, world-class quality, and efficiency are critical for survival; using the latest technology to accomplish value-based maintenance can give organizations a differential edge over the competition.

Maintenance has evolved fast over the last few decades. Three decades ago, When I was a young engineer, my role as a maintenance planner mainly revolved around implementing Periodic Preventive Maintenance (PPM) and Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) concepts. These concepts depended heavily on the human elements, and the inspection skills most mattered in identifying potential failures. Undoubtedly, ideas like partnering with operators for preventive maintenance and equipment inspection benefit already burdened maintenance resources. However, in the real world, the operator’s little understanding of equipment functioning and little time available for inspections by the operators, reduced the probability of identifying failure risks and mitigating them through appropriate actions. Bathtub Curve and estimating Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF) were the primary driving concepts for designing periodic preventive maintenance in the 20th century. These periodic preventive maintenance activities were carried out in anticipation of future failure based on historical data only and not on prevailing conditions and hence never guaranteed elimination of random failures. The advancement in technology has made it possible to detect the failure early and accurately, providing maintenance the opportunity to carry out the corrective activity before the actual failure occurs and thus allowing maintenance to utilize its resources most efficiently. For the first time with the advent of the Computer Managed Maintenance System (CMMS), maintenance organizations can organize and process various maintenance data and benefit from data-driven decision making, thereby increasing plant availability and improving OEE (Overall Equipment Efficiency).  

In recent years, technologies like Big Data, Cloud Systems, Artificial Intelligence, and the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) have revolutionized how CMMS work. Today with the cloud-based CMMS systems and IoT devices, real-time maintenance data such as vibration, temperature, pressure, and levels can not only be logged but can also be trended, notifying the user when the values cross the provided threshold limits, using text, email or via CMMS work order generation. These devices have eliminated the need for frequent manual inspections and do the job much more efficiently without the need for human monitoring. Furthermore, with Artificial Intelligence, the threshold value can be continuously refined, and the systems can learn exact limits with continued usage. Entrusting technology with collecting data results in better use of premium maintenance resources in analyzing data and designing their PMs and maintenance activity for the real problems rather than doing periodic PMs in anticipation of historical failure patterns. Another area where technology has revolutionized maintenance is enhanced collaboration. Technology had enabled accessing the process and equipment remotely in real-time. With the advancement in internet technology, it is possible to transmit extensive data at a much higher speed which is being utilized in real-time troubleshooting by experts across the continent or carrying out training for the operation and maintenance workforce for newly commissioned equipment.

“It is imperative that as maintenance leaders, we must leverage newer technology for transitioning from costly corrective and breakdown maintenance to more proactive predictive maintenance driven by actual data.”

It is pretty evident from the above examples that the newer technology has revolutionized maintenance in today’s manufacturing world, and usage of the latest technology can be game-changing for Industries. However, many manufacturing organizations face one common challenge: their readiness to benefit from the technology revolution. Many Organizations were established several decades ago and need an upgrade in the existing equipment and the infrastructure to make it compatible with the newer technology. These maintenance upgrades need extensive capital investments and must compete with other potential investments in the organization in terms of benefits realization. The plant engineering department has a crucial role in preparing and presenting a comprehensive cost-benefit analysis, payback period, and the long-term impact of such investments to the management. This way, all the potential benefits can be well understood while comparing them with other attractive short-term but not so impactful investments.

To summarize, maintenance in the industry has evolved over the years from being considered a necessary evil to a value-creating activity, directly impacting the product’s cost and quality and hence the bottom line. The role of maintenance in the Industry 4.0 is even more significant considering the world-class edge maintenance can provide for the organization. It is imperative that as maintenance leaders, we must leverage newer technology for transitioning from costly corrective and breakdown maintenance to more proactive predictive maintenance driven by actual data. This approach will help our organizations to establish a leadership position in the market with highly valued products at competitive prices and with world-class On-Time-Delivery (OTD).