Is your team ready to take action on your predictive maintenance data?
Readers of a certain age will pick up on the headline of this month’s editors note, as will many Millennials and Zoomers. It’s a paraphrase of the advice given to Dustin Hoffman’s recent college grad in the 1967 movie “The Graduate” by one of his parents’ friends.
The movie follows Hoffman’s character, Benjamin Braddock, as a sort of case study of the next generation as he takes his first steps into an uncertain post-education future. Not every choice he makes is perfect, but by the end of the movie Braddock has navigated a few mis-steps and is starting to chart his own course.
The Sep/Oct 2024 issue of Plant Services features our annual roundup of compelling predictive maintenance case studies from contributing editor Sheila Kennedy. She’s been writing up this annual summary for five years now, and each year includes a theme that ties the case studies together. You guessed it, this year’s theme is “data” – specifically, what to do with it once you’ve collected it.
There are a lot of maintenance programs that identify their critical assets, then identify the data required to better understand machine health, and finally invest in the tools (both hardware and software) to collect those data. This year’s cover story features case studies from organizations that made it through these steps, but then made good use of their data to drive proactive maintenance decisions. These organizations:
- deployed AI predictive analytics across multiple critical subsystems to predict impending failures
- automated manual processes and streamlined data exchange between operations and maintenance
- solved data fragmentation with a dashboard presenting a single source of truth to streamline maintenance service cases
- used their CMMS to standardize and centralize maintenance workflows, policies, and procedures.
The message of these case studies is reinforced by this month’s column from Jeff Shiver, who offers his own single word for us to remember: “implementation.” Shiver urges everyone to do what each of these companies did – once the work of identifying the problems and developing solutions is done, make sure that those solutions are implemented.
