Ineffective maintenance strategies can result in up to 20% reduction in a plant’s overall productivity. It can be difficult to determine how often a machine should be taken offline to be serviced as well as weigh the risks of lost production time against those of a potential breakdown. Traditionally, it was a case of choosing between maximising the useful life of components, at the risk of equipment downtime, and attempting to maximise up-time through early replacement of potentially good parts. Real-time monitoring is providing an entirely new series of insights into how manufacturing equipment and machinery life spans can be improved. By combining real-time data with predictive analytics, it’s possible to gain quicker insights and determine which areas of availability, performance and quality are most impacting performance.
Despite this, simply gathering the information from sensors and systems is not enough to yield the benefits of predictive maintenance. The ability to collate and then analyse data can be crucial to predicting impending failure. Real-time asset monitoring employs data to better inform maintenance decisions, provide greater transparency into equipment health, and enable enhanced collaboration from multiple sources to maintain assets in the most efficient way. This real-time flow of information, and the ability to analyse it effectively, can increase operational efficiencies and improve equipment performance by using digital data to drive physical action in the form of maintenance and servicing. By trending data and tracking changes through analysis of equipment and system performance, successful sites can use key measurements to improve asset availability.
Tan Delta’s real-time monitoring solutions have multiple connectivity paths (mobile data, WiFi and/or Ethernet networks) to the TDOnline platform. This data hub not only facilitates real-time monitoring of site equipment, but the stored data can be analysed and trended enabling operators to optimise their maintenance strategy and improve operational practices, saving time, resource and money.