Downtime remains a crippling threat to all manufacturers, disrupting production output and customer deliveries. For the wider business, downtime causes revenue loss, questions over reputation, and tremors up and down the supply chain.
The costs of repairs, additional charges for product and parts storage disruption, non-optimal delivery costs, and potential fines if there were safety issues, can also damage a business.
This is why there is great pressure on all manufacturers to master that key question, how to reduce machine downtime? The key functions are well known to manufacturing leaders and professionals, primarily preventive and predictive maintenance.
Benefits of New-Build and IoT for Manufacturing
With smart systems, increasingly intelligent sensors and clear dashboards, all connected through the internet of things (IoT), manufacturers know more about their production centers and processes than ever before. This information supports preventative maintenance processes, alerting managers and users to issues well before production-impacting issues.
Upgrading old production floors and factories to new models may sound logical. However, the cost of replacing them with IoT facilities, training staff, retooling systems, and integrating digital systems can challenge smaller, cash-strapped, and resource-constrained companies.
However, the cost will be smaller than running a creaking old factory, with inevitable and increasingly expensive breakdowns. And the disruption allows a company to create new best practices across the business to refine supply chain processes, manufacturing, and benefit from new skills and knowledge.
And with new manufacturing centers, offering higher-quality transport facilities, more efficient energy supplies and other benefits like tax incentives, there is great opportunity.
Lock-in Predictive and Preventative Maintenance Strategies
As any wider manufacturing and production improvement process takes place, ensuring predictive and preventative maintenance are integrated across the system is essential to deliver maximum efficiency. Training is also a key element, ensuring all workers and managers understand these systems, and what each type of alert means, and how best to investigate and resolve it.
For preventive maintenance, a regular schedule of inspections in line with operational usage and guidelines should identify most issues ahead of them becoming serious issues. Any maintenance including cleaning, changing consumables like lubrication, and quality control should all be a part of the daily or weekly ritual. These catch most problems before they become an issue, identifying leaks and weak or tear, the most common precursors to a larger problem.
The smarts of the IoT come into play when looking at tracking predictive maintenance from vibration, temperature, slippage and other sensors, operators get a sense of the near-invisible forces at play within a production plant. The alarms will come well ahead of a person’s ability to identify them, before they become a major issue.
Reacting to these as part of regular maintenance saves the drama and cost of a full-blown failure, or if the source of the problem remains a mystery, teams can keep an eye on it to identify any true source.
The Power of Continuous Improvement
When a manufacturing plant is running smoothly, that is not the time for management to relax and doze on the job. Continuous monitoring is required to ensure the plant continues to run well, and continuous improvement will help make further savings and efficiencies across the business, to keep up with competition and make the company more attractive to investors and partners.
Continuous improvement can come from multiple elements, with software providing new insights into manufacturing processes, upgraded manufacturing facilities adding new features or improving existing ones. Also, personal skills can improve the morale and efficiency of the human element on the factory floor.
Regularly asking how the business can improve performance, looking for new ideas and finding methods to improve reliability can all lead to stronger operational results, and a greater sense of team, even as automation becomes a greater part of production.
As part of operational considerations, liability insurance is key to ensuring you are covered in the event of a failure or accident during the manufacturing process. Or, if a customer who buys a product that turns out to have been made during a faulty process.
Whatever stage your manufacturing business is at, the faster it moves to an ongoing improvement approach, the sooner it can identify and deliver benefits in time and cost savings. While creating the platform for the manufacturing operation to grow, win new business and take advantage of technology, supply chain and wider business improvements.
Without this approach, the business is more likely to stagnate, lose trade to more aggressive competitors and see workers leave for more interesting opportunities. Even a niche business in a secure market is ripe for disruption as manufacturing speeds up around the world and competitors look for easy wins to boost their offering.
