When it comes to taking care of your industrial property, extreme vigilance is needed because of the rising costs of industrial maintenance Nashville TN companies experience. Rather than place this burden upon your crew or your administrative team, the industrial internet of things makes it possible to rely on maintenance software to work with key devices on manufacturing repair and productivity needs. For smaller budgets, a more old-fashioned approach to maintenance may be needed.

1. Reactive Maintenance

A fairly common maintenance plan among smaller businesses is the run-until-it-breaks-down strategy. In this approach, repairs aren’t a planned part of the budget and the maintenance reaction is to simply fix a piece of equipment when it breaks. Though not an ideal plan, it can be useful if this is the approach taken with low-cost equipment, pieces of machinery that are used infrequently or equipment that isn’t vital to the operations of the company.

2. Preventative Maintenance

Rather than waiting until something breaks, this approach is proactive and schedules repairs or maintenance checks. Predetermined intervals are set up to take the asset offline and inspect it for areas of wear and tear. The scheduling needs for potentially dozens of pieces of equipment leads many companies to use maintenance software to generate a work order when maintenance is due. Automating the scheduling can avoid missing key pieces of equipment, and the prior knowledge of an upcoming check can have all the resources on hand should something need repairs.

3. Predictive Maintenance

Predicting failures before they occur is an industry trend and a prime reason for investing in manufacturing software and management plans. Human intelligence can’t accurately estimate when a part on a machine is going to give out or when a circuit will short out, leading to the use of sensitive, smart technological equipment to gather the data. Sensors are placed in or on machines and AI-powered software programs analyze performance and identify risks of failure. Alerts are then used to get the attention of the maintenance team.

4. Reliability-Centered Maintenance

This is a more sophisticated process that acknowledges the complexities of system or equipment failure. Rather than look at individual pieces, this process evaluates all the possible areas where a piece of machinery could fail. Then, a customized maintenance plan is drafted for the specific asset.

Regardless of which maintenance plan you choose, being prepared for the inevitable can ensure you experience the least amount of downtime possible in repairs. Rely on common sense and technology to improve the performance and longevity of your equipment.