The true value of the IoT?

What is the true value of IoT for predictive maintenance?

Remember when your servomotor broke down, and you had to fix it? This is reactive maintenance, which does not require any planning, it just requires dealing with breakdowns day by day as they arise.

-See these pictures how example whit bearings broken.

To minimize these last-minute checks and high expenses, nowadays many companies use preventive maintenance, which means you maintain your servomotors and equipment on a fixed schedule. It’s like taking your car for a routine maintenance check and oil change every 12 months. However, that wasn’t enough  because sometimes your servomotor broke down before the set regular service, or sometimes the time period between two scheduled services was too long.

This worked, but it required a technician going onsite, taking readings, capturing data then creating spreadsheets and predicting maintenance based on the analysis. It also required informing the system engineer and maintenance department about it. The result helped a lot, but the execution was exhausting.

It was done on an ad-hoc basis. And then the IoT emerged, simplifying the process with real-time monitoring, and detecting the condition of servomotors, and predicting maintenance based on it.

Many businesses currently have replacement schedules on their servomotors. This involves replacing all components and bearings whether they are worn or not.

Predictive maintenance is about constant monitoring of equipment conditions to predict issues. IoT sensors play an essential role in this process, as they gather data about different parameters (e.g., temperature, vibration, etc.) Then, this data is analyzed to predict when a failure may occur. With the help of the IoT, maintenance is performed only when it is actually required, so it helps businesses avoid unnecessary maintenance expenses.

We think we live in a modern world, but we actually waste a lot of resources, in terms of time and money, by making the wrong decisions

The true value of the IoT is that we can now collect enough data, cost-effective data that already exists, but that we never captured. We can now capture this data continuously, and quite effortlessly, in enormous volumes.

So, this is it. IoT enables maintenance people to make better and faster decisions. Why is this important? Because downtime in manufacturing is a disaster. Through vibration analysis businesses can pre-plan servomotor maintenance to eliminate any forced downtime, as well as avoid greater servomotor repair costs.