IoT is changing the world around us. This change is affecting every walk of life including the maintenance industry. Maintenance management used to depend on skills of the maintenance managers to troubleshoot skills and was least data-driven as they have very limited data to fall back on when it came to machine health. However, it is rapidly changing. It is becoming heavily data-driven than skill driven. Advances in wireless communications and data processing enable maintenance managers to gauge the health of the factory in an instant.
We can tell that its no longer a hype but a reality and proof is in the fact that the leading organization- OPC Foundation is spending time in developing the Unified Architecture (UA) Specification for IIoT in the manufacturing environment. The standard is being developed to enable IIOT devices to easily pass information between sensors, machines, monitoring devices and the cloud in a secure and open way. Also OPC, AMT & OMAC have jointly developed Packaging Machine Language (PackML) and MTConnect which combines OPC UA with existing industry standards to lower cost of predictive maintenance.
Low cost of IIOT sensors is making predicting failure or measuring remaining useful life (RUL) of a tool a no-brainer enabling maximum uptime at optimum costs . As an example, a drill over course of its functioning will start to suffer wear. As we continue using them regularly at some point of time they become unusable either because the precision of the job falls below the parameter or the drill bit breaks off. With the combination of Industrial IoT sensors and AI techniques today we can easily predict the remaining useful life of the tool .
Any maintenance professional will agree with me that predictive maintenance is a journey they have to take but IIOT makes the journey easier. Retrofitting existing machine with a sensor to measure machine health becomes very easy. One of the companies where we work with to enable this transitions is OPA By Design. It is a smart device which can be tagged to any existing machine at a very minimal cost to measure 8 different parameters and report it maintenance supervisors via mobile app & cloud. Since the machine is constantly being monitored, any sign in degradation in the health of the machine is alerted instantly
IIOT is also enabling to drive down the inventory holding cost as now maintenance supervisors have better predictability of machine failure and hence they have to stock less spares. It also results in fewer emergency inventory orders and less downtime due to out-of-stock inventory.
IIOT is not changing anything for the maintenance professional except the fact that he can now listen to his assets and make informed decisions based on actual data on the health of the asset. IIOT is not going to fix the problem for him. He will still have to depend on his best technician to fix it reliably