Predictive maintenance : The effect on a Company's Bottom line

The true benefit of a Predictive Maintenance program can be determined with a cost/benefit analysis. Unfortunately, our industry has not standardized a method for counting a program's benefit and this has introduced wild scatter in the claims made regarding a program's effectiveness. An example of this could be the declared value of a bearing replacement recommendation that might range from the price of a new bearing to extensive production losses and the cost of replacing not just the hearing but a new machine. The true benefit of the recommendation is more likely some point between the extremes. A systematic logical approach for determining the benefit of a repair recommendation will be presented by this paper. The approach assumes that a single monetary predictive maintenance benefit can be assigned to any machine by taking the 'average' of a large set of probable failures that could occur. This approach can be globally applied to further simplify a cost benefit analysis if like machinery is grouped and then a single monetary value is used for the grouping. With this approach, only a small number of standard case studies are needed to represent a program. If a machine is in a failure mode, then the machine will fail with or without the help of predictive maintenance. The use of Predictive Maintenance technologies can not prevent a failure that is occurring. They can however reduce the severity or cost of the failure and repair. The true cost savings (or cost avoidance) of a repair recommendation is the difference between the cost of repair assuming that a predictive program was not in place, and the cost of repair with the help of PdM. A model of failure probability along with a case study example of the model and a form that could be used to establish a generic or global economic machine failure case study will be presented. Reducing the cost of a failure is important but it may not be the most significant monetary benefit of a predictive program. Arguably, a Predicative Maintenance program's greatest benefit is in extending the mean time between failures for a given machine. A strategy will be discussed that estimates the money saved from this important aspect of a predictive program.