You as a small business owner (or manufacturer or entrepreneur or skilled craftsperson or whatever you call yourself) know that your equipment needs maintenance. But have you heard of Predictive Maintenance? That’s right, there’s now equipment that can tell you when it needs maintenance!
Rhonda didn’t know about predictive maintenance at first…
If you’re a regular here at Zattatat, you know that Rhonda is a retired nurse who now runs her own business making and selling wooden items like Gnome-Shaped Beer Mugs.
Recently, though, Rhonda had been having issues with her equipment going down *just* when she was hit with a big seasonal demand bump.
Luckily, Rhonda was in the habit of attending open-to-the-public talks at the local university, and she happened to catch one about….
Predictive Maintenance
At the talk, Rhonda learned that predictive maintenance consists of basically this:
- Equipment has sensors to monitor things that can predict when it might need maintenance. This can include things directly relevant to the equipment’s function, such as temperature or pressure; or it can also be something like an acoustic monitor to “listen” for changes in a machine’s function (the same way you might notice when your car engine is “making a funny sound.”
- Typically some element of machine learning – what specific markers in the data supplied by the sensors has been found to correlate with equipment needing maintenance?
- Communication: notification that the equipment needs maintenance.
To look at this in a little more depth, check out this case study from the Intstitute of Engineering and Technology. (And if you’re new to reading scientific papers? This article may help 🙂
Anyway, Rhonda also learned about the…
Benefits of Predictive Maintenance
Yes, it’s true: predictive maintenance can save time, money, avoid worker injuries, and even be better for the environment!
And predictive maintenance is showing up in other industries too – like this example of a hospital building’s HVAC systems!
Rhonda did a quick search and ended up discovering that there was currently no commercially-available predictive maintenance technology that was affordable and made sense for the equipment she was using, at the scale she was using it.
But, she was still glad she had done the research and knew that she would keep the new technology on her radar…
Weekly Challenge:
Take a few minutes to learn a bit more about predicitive maintenance. Is it a technology that you could use in your business?
Also: do you live in an area with a college, university, or other institution that offers public talks on current scientific research? If so, be like Rhonda and make it a habit to attend once or twice a month!
