Preventive Maintenance. This is an increasingly sought-after solution by organizations looking to perform at the highest cost. This is because it aims to prevent equipment failures, so that the operation is continuous and it is not necessary to bear repairs and emergency changes.

Today, more than necessary, anticipating problems and keeping the company with high performance has become a fundamental issue, since the market expects agility, competition is high, customers are demanding and expenses must be controlled to minimize losses.

If you’ve come this far, it’s probably because you’re interested in getting this and other differentials brought by proactive conduct. In that case, you’ve come to the right place. Follow our article and learn all about it!

Learn more about Preventive Maintenance

According to NBR 5462,of the Brazilian Association of Technical Standards (ABNT), preventive maintenance is the set of technical and administrative actions with the objective of reducing the probability of failure or degradation of the operation of an item.

In practice, the processes take place through the planning of periodic inspections on various types of machinery and equipment,whether industrial, automotive, hydraulic, among others. Some results, in this case, are the conservation of assets, the safety of workers, customer satisfaction and the economy.

The issue of maintenance in times of Industry 4.0

Preventive maintenance is a concept that began in the 1950s, between the Period of World War II and post-war, when the sector realized the need to ensure reliability and availability of assets while maintaining productivity. Since then it has been used to restore the original conditions of the equipment, before potential failures arise.

Like countless other processes, this has undergone significant changes from industry 4.0 technologies. Today, what is expected is to perform an increasing number of maintenance activities, with increasingly optimized features.

For this, technological resources such as artificial intelligence and internet of things (IoT) are used, which help in the insertion of the future element, enabling us to have answers to situations that have not yet occurred, but would if no action were taken.

One of the concepts of Industry 4.0 is the creation of a virtual model of the machines and the entire production system, so that it is controlled and can be operated remotely. This is facilitated with the use of sensors, which send the control software the situation of each equipment. The system, which allows the detection of irregularities in real time, can be based on preventive maintenance, corrective maintenance and predictive maintenance.

Corrective maintenance x preventive maintenance x predictive maintenance: understand the differences

As we mention, industrial maintenance is composed of three methods, which are applied at different times, as well as bring different results. To make you understand each of them better, here’s what they’re all about:

• Preventive maintenance: aims to reduce failures or falls in machine performance through a pre-elaborated schedule in which periodic inspections are included;
• Predictive maintenance: actsin the routine inspection of equipment to identify abnormalities that may cause problems. This periodic monitoring is used by data collected through monitoring or inspections. The most used techniques are vibration analysis, ultrasound, visual inspection and non-destructive analysis techniques.
• Corrective maintenance: Occurs when a fault is already detected and activities occur in an unscheduled manner. As can be imagined, in this case there may be interruption in activities and unexpected costs due to the actions carried out in an emergency manner.

From what you have been able to prove, you need to have an adequate maintenance planning, which includes preventive maintenance, to avoid losses, to the same extent that you get better results.

The importance of preventive maintenance for your organization

It is possible that you have already heard the saying “the cheap that comes out expensive”. It applies well when it comes to lack of maintenance in an organization. After all, when inspections are seen as a cost and not an investment, the company ends up spending exorbitant amounts with unexpected failures.

In addition, equipment that is not reviewed periodically may have loss in performance without demonstrating, requiring a higher expenditure of electricity, for example.

When the organization invests in preventive maintenance, the scenario is just the opposite. In this case, some advantages are:

• ensures maximum use of the life of the machines;
• optimizes resources for reasons such as having more time to search suppliers, lower costs of repairs and parts changes, and minimizing overtime by unexpected stops;
• quality of the operation, since production is carried out on time and, consequently, customers are satisfied;
• prevention of accidents at work, ranging from the simplest to the most serious, capable of bringing incalculable damage.

With these factors, it is clear the importance of this type of maintenance to decrease the probability of failures. But in order to be advantageous and make sense for the company, it needs to beused strategically, based on well-structured planning and the best partnerships and tools.

To help companies perform preventive maintenance and their other subtypes efficiently, Nalbatech provides SAN Mobile, a platform that helps teams perform consultations, updates, data release and order confirmation in real time, 100% compatible with SAP® PM module.

This brings process automation securely and simply, all in user-friendly, fast and intuitive interfaces, so companies minimize errors and reduce time spent on highly transactional processes.

We hope that our article will help your organization to rely on well-structured maintenance processes. Interested in knowing Nalbatech’s solutions for process automation? So contact one of our expertsright now!

In the day-to-day of industrial operations, it is not uncommon for the Operations Manager or the person responsible for the shop floor to find it difficult to establish an industrial maintenance schedule. The truth is that, in many places, the topic is still considered as a minor concern.

But anyone who understands the subject knows it’s not like that.

Good industrial maintenance can be decisive for the company to comply with its strategic planning,reducing costs and boosting productivity. However, not all managers see these benefits.

Thus, to the person responsible for the shop floor, it is the task of clarifying the theme and explaining the importance of applying good industrial maintenance throughout the factory. And you encounter difficulties like these, so common in the Brazilian manufacturing environment?

In this content, we’ll share some tips that can help you direct your arguments. After all, industrial maintenance is one of the pillars of companies that seek a differential now and in the future, but what is left for you to convince your manager of this? Check out!

Maintenance as a strategic function

The production chain of a company is not something simple. It is a complex system whose function goes far beyond production simply. In fact, the shop floor plays an essential strategic role for the company as a whole, being the core of what it sells. Among other cases, the productive sector:

• Contributes to the company’s main objectives;
• It is a place that requires intense planning;
• It has a technical machinery, whose conditions influence in all production — and consequently, in the results;
• It needs the greatest possible effectiveness and effectiveness, because its operation should be continuous to the maximum.

With this, you can understand why industrial maintenance is so important. This is the planned process that guarantees this desired productive continuity.

However, you may wonder: how does maintenance influence production to the point of ensuring these results?

• Quality,as it reduces the need for rework and keeps all machinery and equipment in the best conditions.
• Agility,as it makes the production level even more optimized by reducing machine downtime.
• Flexibility,because there are different concepts that can be applied in various situations, avoiding problems from different sources.
• Savings,because it ensures the maximum operation of the machinery, enhancing its useful life and avoiding unexpected expenses.

How to have an industrial maintenance up to date

Once your manager understands the importance of industrial maintenance, you need to be aware of your practice. After all, how to keep your application up to date? It’s not just about observing the conditions of a machine and deciding whether to fix it or not.

At this point, it is necessary to consider some mandatory tasks that will facilitate your day to day. Check:

Registration and classification of assets

Your inventory needs constant updating with each move. This way, you can make a more appropriate control of what enters and leaves your shop floor, thus evaluating the daily, weekly, monthly demands, etc.

A classification system serves to hierarchize these assets into a logic of importance: the greater their relevance to the shop floor, the higher in the hierarchy. Therefore, more important to be evaluated by the inspectors.

Create different maintenance plans

The world of industrial maintenance is based on three very important concepts:

Predictive maintenance, preventive maintenance and corrective maintenance.

The three are part of the day-to-day of an optimized shop floor, in which maintenance is prioritized. After all, each concept has its peculiarity and your company must be prepared to apply them in every type of situation. Therefore, planning is essential.

Technology to assist management and make the progress of activities more flexible

Like all business processes today, it is not feasible to keep activity records and Work Orders in spreadsheets or folders, for example. In fact, it takes a system that integrates all of this so that everyone involved can access information, documentation, among others.

SAP PM®, sap’s ERP Plant Maintenance management module, is one of the most recommended.

Moreover, it is necessary to think about the flexibility of the work performed. Some industrial plants do not allow the specialist to perform maintenance without first informing the system of any exchange. Often, in fieldwork, this communication is even more limited.

Therefore, an application that enables this interaction via smartphone, even offline, is the best alternative.

Learn about industrial maintenance indicators

Now, it’s time to understand what’s working and what’s not in your industrial maintenance plan. How to accomplish this task? After all, just relying on the reports issued by your management software is not enough. It is necessary to start from a principle, but which one?

The guidelines you are looking for are named: maintenance indicators. Below are some of the main ones:

MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) | Average Time Between Failures

This is the relationship between the total time in hours of a machine running and the number of times a failure occurred. This result gives you an average of hours between each failure, indicating your propensity for failure, which can help you plan.

MTTR (Mean Time To Repair) | Average Time for Repair

The relationship between the time (in minutes or hours) of repairs performed on a machine (the sum) and the number of times the intervention was required. The result will be the average repair time required, which will tell you how long the production will suffer from the shutdown.

Asset Availability

This indicator tells you the possibility of a machine being available for use. It follows a formula that takes into account the two indicators above:

Availability: (MTBF / (MTBF + MTTR)) x 100

The result is the percentage of availability.

Percentage of Maintenance Cost

Indicates the annual cost in relation to the company’s revenue. The formula is similar to the one above, being:

Maintenance Cost: (Total Maintenance Cost / Gross Billing) x 100

The result represents the percentage of the cost. The Brazilian average is no more than 4.

Maintenance cost per ERV

This indicator concerns the cost of maintenance per asset. In this case, ERV stands for Estimated Replace Value. The formula is known as CPMR:

CPMR: (Total spent on asset maintenance / Asset purchase value) x 100

The result will be a percentage that indicates whether it is worth keeping the asset in question. In general, it is considered 2.5 as maximum. If the result passes this, it means that the asset (machine) no longer has a good cost x benefit and can be considered an exchange.

Now that you know how to convince your manager of the importance of industrial maintenance, how to put in place a management plan and how to manage it, the time has come to put everything into practice!

For this, count on the help of Nalbatech. The company specializes in creating technological solutions such as SAN Mobile. The application is compatible with SAP PM® and assists in automating mobile processes.

Contact one of our experts right now!

In times of race for the optimization of internal processes, the eyes of the specialists turn to the factories. After all, where to begin this transformation? Applying concepts like Industry 4.0 gives you an idea —because it points to the path of technology. However, it is necessary a more micro look, which observes each stage of the productive routine. With a brief analysis, it is possible to identify the opportunities in the field of Industrial Maintenance — and also the doubts. So how to improve precisely this process, adapting its application with current technologies and modern requirements?

The answer is in SAN Mobile, mobile maintenance app.

In fact, the lack of solutions like this has always been a pain of companies with manufacturing plants and whose industrial maintenance was a daily necessity.

After all, year after year, what we saw was an evolution of the technological level of machinery. Increasingly, machines have become smarter and more efficient. However, they are still machines —and industrial maintenance is a necessity for all of them.

According to research by American experts, every dollar a company stops investing in industrial maintenance can cost the quadruple in the future. That is, relegating a $1,000 intervention today could cause a $4,000 loss to your pocket at some point.

Therefore, the question remains: what happened to the industrial maintenance stage? What has evolved it to the point of aligning it with current industry practices and trends?

After all, that’s necessary, everyone knows. To discover this scenario, remembering how industrial maintenance was conducted before SAN Mobile and what impacts after its application, just continue reading this article.
If your company is looking for modern solutions that revolutionize your industrial maintenance processes, surely the content will be of great benefit.

Check out!

Industrial Maintenance before SAN Mobile

Until a few years ago, what was seen in companies was a mismatch between the technological level of the manufacturing plant, which embraced innovation, and the industrial maintenance technique.

Not that the methods were outdated, but in much, the tools were.

A factory floor is an essential part of a company, full of sectors. In an automaker, there are cores for each part of an automobile beyond the assembly line. In a metalworking company, there is machining, welding, drilling, among others.
Industrial maintenance as it was before was based on a monolithic inspection method. Build a predictive maintenance routine:

The operator of a machine noticed a problem and warned the inspector, who then checked it. All the notes made on a record or something. After that, this form had to pass to the system for the appropriate Work Orders to be issued.

Of course that is not the case for all companies, but it is possible to imagine similar situations in various scenarios, right?

Now, imagine: how much time and resources were invested for this particular case? The escalation of activities impresses, even when we talk about a hypothetical case. In a complete factory plant, the scenery is even scarier.
Despite walking, industrial maintenance has always been conducted idling.

In fact, due to a bureaucracy of control that, although necessary, relied on methods and resources that inhibited it from any agility.

There were some side effects felt. In smaller companies, for example, the very role of industrial maintenance has been put into question. Not ignored, but not seen as a priority.

Not for less, to date, the loss of unscheduled stops at U.S. companies costs a lot of money: up to $50 billion annually.

Revolution: What changes in Industrial Maintenance with SAN Mobile?

SAN Mobile is precisely this step beyond what companies needed, a way to feel what Industry 4.0 is.

The solution developed by Nalbatech integrates with your SAP PM, the ERP Plant Maintenance management module.

With SAN Mobile, as the name suggests, industrial maintenance actions can be managed by mobile devices (even without an Internet connection).

On practical issues, this means that all power and agility of action focuses on the hands of your operators and maintenance specialists. Thus, they do not rely on preventative technologies or are at the mercy of time-consuming processes, such as the posting of Work Orders, for example.

Everything can be done, accessed and updated on time, speeding up the industrial maintenance process to a level never seen before.

In the industrial context, SAN Mobile means industrial maintenance that can be practiced more dynamically, in real time. The application assists in the management of all industrial maintenance within the shop floor. Among the activities it facilitates are:

• inspection;
• notifications;
• corrective maintenance;
• preventive maintenance;
• repairs (corrective maintenance).

The purpose of the application is to serve as a means for professionals in the field to perform their tasks on site, in real time.

This eliminates the occurrence of parallel controls that generate conflicting and outdated data. This reduces the amount of rework at the same time that you qualify data collection, making the analysis of this information even more reliable.

It also stands out the best access to system data — because the application is available for SAP HANA and SAP ECC. With a simple and intuitive interface, any professional can find himself in the system and access notes, installation locations, measurement documents, hours of activity, work orders, equipment and more.

Another benefit is that SAN Mobile enables customizations in an extremely agile and low cost manner at no additional cost. That is, you can transform it into an application tailored to the needs of your business, improving your industrial maintenance without development obstacles.

SAN Mobile is a step further for companies looking to get closer to Industry 4.0. Better industrial maintenance streamlines processes and makes your productive routine more effective, as well as extending the service life of your machinery.

Want to know more about the app and how it can benefit your business? Contact Nalbatech!