Every percentage counts! As a chief executive in your corporation, you know that any increase in percentage of the plant’s mechanical availability is crucial to your bottom line. Predictive maintenance (PdM) is one of the means to make this difference. Buying a predictive maintenance solution is a good start, but it is not enough.

Plant Manager: Have You Assigned Your Predictive Maintenance Officer Yet?

Change of Paradigm

To achieve outcomes, a change of paradigm is needed – a new approach to failures. It is no longer “It’s broken, let’s fix it.” Now, with alerts in advance, there is a new set of decisions that must be taken.

A good predictive maintenance solution would take care of the analytics part and provide accurate alerts, ahead of time. The operator can and will learn to trust them. But as good as the alerts may be, if they remain unattended to, the plant will not benefit from the smart solutions. In addition, checking the alerts is only the beginning of the story. The more complicated part is to create processes to check and potentially solve problems at their early stages, long before they affect production.

PdM Officer Responsibilities

We have learned from our experience with customers that there is a missing link. There has to be a function that takes ownership of predictive maintenance. A function that:

  • Chooses the right predictive maintenance solution.
  • Is in charge of implementing the solution.
  • Sets workflows to work with the solution – what to do when an alert is triggered, who is involved, and what steps should be taken.
  • Accompanies and leads the process from the very beginning of the realization that there is a problem.
  • Sets KPIs and verifies that the solution is being used and is exploited to its full potential.

Predictive maintenance is not an analytical exercise – it is a process change. The PdMO will be the one to make sure that the right processes are being placed within the organization in order to exploit the real value of the predictive maintenance paradigm change.

Just as safety is an important issue in manufacturing and there’s a dedicated manager to handle safety issues, you can’t talk about adopting predictive maintenance in your plant without assigning a specific person to carry out the new workflows in the company. These persons are agents of change, of something new. They are evangelists.

From Innovation to Operation

As of today, predictive maintenance solutions are perceived as part of the innovation that the industry wants to adopt. This is very true, but it shouldn’t stop there. Innovation teams in these companies know perfectly well the importance of staying abreast with technology. They acknowledge the risks of staying behind while the competitors and the rest of the industry move forward. That said, in order for changes to take place and to get the full benefit of predictive maintenance, you must plan how to shift the ownership of predictive maintenance to operations.

So – do you already have someone in mind? The sooner the better! Assign a Predictive Maintenance Officer and lead the change in your company.

For further assistance on how to implement the change, contact us at info@precog.co

Your thoughts and feedback would be appreciated.