Predictive Maintenance: Enabling Your Operation to Run Smoothly
It’s in the name - predictive maintenance allows you to predict when a piece of equipment is likely to break. For some, this may seem counterintuitive – why spend money repairing something that seems to be working fine? But this way of thinking can have devastating consequences for your business down the line.
Predicting when machines and equipment are likely to fail can avoid operations coming to a halt, reduce long-term costs and yes - even get you closer to your sustainability goals. It empowers businesses to be proactive by stepping in before things break and making the necessary repairs to continue operating at full efficiency. Going a step further, smart IoT technology gives companies the knowledge they need to determine how and why something is going to break in the first place. How does it do this? Through the power of data.
Devices like Invisible Systems IoT sensors facilitate predictive maintenance to help operations run at maximum efficiency. The sensors monitor parameters such as temperature and vibration in real time, feeding this data into a personalised online dashboard called Real-Time Online. Not only does this allow you to catch problems before they escalate, it also helps to identify patterns in the types of faults that might occur. This means that you can solely focus on fixing that issue or addressing external factors that might be contributing to the damage. IoT technology serves as an invaluable tool for proactive planning, and the benefits are manifold:
Sustainability
Using Invisible Systems IoT sensors to predict equipment failure can help you to become a greener business. When equipment or appliances break, you’d normally rely on a backup generator to keep things running while you get the problem fixed. More often than not, this uses a lot of electricity, especially when systems are down for a lengthy period of time. By utilising the data collected by IoT devices, you can prevent these failures from ever happening – no energy-guzzling generators are required.
Predictive maintenance can also increase asset lifetime. This drives down the need for new machinery and, subsequently, the huge amount of energy that is used in the production, delivery and installation processes. Many companies opt to take preventive measures to avoid downtime (i.e. fixing equipment on a regular basis and at regular intervals, even when it’s unnecessary). With Invisible Systems sensors, you can constantly monitor the conditions of your assets to avoid needless repairs, focusing only on the equipment that demands attention. This reduces the environmental impact of unnecessary travel, e.g. by repair companies called out to fix the issues, as well as the amount of resources (like electricity) required to make the repairs.
Cost savings
All of the benefits mentioned above come with significant cost savings. Companies who utilise Invisible Systems IoT technology can expect fewer unnecessary repair costs, a decreased likelihood of downtime affecting operations, reduced expenditure on backup generators, and less money spent on new machinery. Depending on the problem, predictive maintenance can also avoid a domino effect; insights provided by smart sensors enable you to catch certain problems before they escalate and prevent further (expensive) issues down the line.
Greater efficiency
By providing greater visibility over all of your assets, the use of IoT technology can massively improve the efficiency of your operations. Major system failures can shut down production for days, even weeks, at a time. Predictive maintenance can prevent this from happening by increasing the efficiency and reliability of your machinery. Even better, Invisible Systems IoT sensors run unobtrusively in the background. The online dashboard, Real-time Online, automatically sends alerts about potential faults via email or text. This means that there’s no interference with your operations – everything can run as normal.
Leading on from this, repairs can be scheduled at non-peak times to keep things running at optimal levels. With the data insights provided by IoT technology, you can know in advance when a piece of machinery might break and choose a time that is least likely to impact operations. Everything breaks at some point and when it does, you want to be prepared. The adoption of IoT technology gives you the power of foresight and ensures that business can continue as normal… with the added benefits of significant cost savings, reduced environmental impact and increased efficiency.