Cost Effective Method to Improve Systems through PdM

With the increase of population, the demand for services, facilities, and day to day essentials has increased while the safety has become a keyword. Reliability is the key factor to ensure a proper life cycle. An efficient maintenance is very important to ensure the reliability and to cater safety in required services, facilities, and day to day essentials. Equipment used in power generation too is getting more complex and sophisticated.

Different maintenance approaches have been developed in last 4-5 decades. These approaches have been ranging from reactive to proactive models. But the problem is still in many places, the practicing maintenance approach is reactive. It means run-to-failure. Some industries and manufacturers have invested through proactive models. Preventive and predictive models come under proactive approach. Repairs have been attended only when failures occur. Many think that reactive approach is cost – effective. But this is not cost – effective as it seems. Thou the private sector considers to change the approach from reactive to proactive, but the government sector is far behind. The costs associated with intermittent failures have to be borne by the government. Employees gladly grab this approach as this simple system is easy to understand and implement.

It is high time to take proper actions to change this system by approaching proactive maintenance to prevent unnecessary breakdowns, thereby increasing the productivity to improve the economy of the country.

In proactive maintenance there are two main strategies which are preventive and predictive. Preventive maintenance is time based. This maintenance is performed with the assumption that the relevant parts or materials should be changed before reaching a failure. These are periodic maintenance and not the optimum solutions. Maintenance is very costly, hence it is very important to identify whether replacement is a must. The predictive maintenance accomplishes this by monitoring the real condition of the relevant parts or materials. Hence adapting and encouraging predictive maintenance at least for critical conditions is very important to reach the sustainable goals.  Considering these factors, the ACCIMT is doing work to identify a low cost solution to introduce Predictive Maintenance.