HAVING A STANDARD by which to judge your mechanical assets enables you to create a condition monitoring system that optimizes your facility’s productivity and efficiency. When developing a maintenance schedule for your facility’s mechanical assets, you may choose to set your own benchmarks, or use industry standards. If you want your assets to be the best of the best, defining your own benchmarks may be a good option, as this will allow you to make process modifications and check the outcomes against your previous data.
Benchmarking and monitoring your mechanical assets has a number of benefits, including cost saving, productivity optimization and reduced downtime. When an asset fails completely, it can wreak havoc on your entire facility. Downtime not only means lost productivity, but also increased costs. At the same time, an overactive preventative maintenance schedule can be likewise detrimental to your budget. For example, if your maintenance teams spend hours every week running diagnostics on mechanical assets, but only finds an issue once every few months, you could be spending more than you need to.
