Thomas WilkThis episode of the rooted in reliability podcast is about the condition of predictive maintenance in the industry and the guest in this episode is Thomas Wilk who is the editor in chief in Plant Services a publication in the field of maintenance and reliability. There is no doubt in the fact that predictive maintenance is very critical for increasing uptime of your equipment and the productivity of your plant. When you can predict the failures that are sure to occur in the earlier or later stages, that is where you start to make the smart decisions regarding the maintenance of your assets that you have placed in your organization.
While there are such incredible benefits of having a predictive or proactive maintenance programs, it is very difficult to successfully implement one of these programs. The biggest reason of failure is that the people working in the organizations feel they are not working up to their full potential because of the machines that are doing half their jobs for them and they feel threatened by that. That s why before introducing such plans, organizations need to create awareness among its workforce. They need to get the complete confidence of all the stakeholders of that company. Then there should be no communication gap between the frontline management and the employees so that they understand each and everything coherently and clearly. The combination of leadership along with the champion makes it much easier for them to stay motivated and work their best at all times.
Sometimes organizations get the new technology but they don t have the support systems, planning and scheduling, and storerooms to back that new initiative at all which ultimately leads to failure of those advanced tools. It is very important to have an open feedback system so that the organization can benefit from the vendors, OEMs, technicians, and the other people inside or outside the organization who might have insights about what others don t know. It happens that the sites who take the first step also called the pilot area that has the generated results to gain the support of upper management but they never grow up because of the lack of communication and budget problems. The concept of predictive modeling has been around for a long time in the industries but people are not fully aware of it. It is one of the best ways to ensure the product reliability which automatically affects the productivity of a plant along with better utilization of your assets.
One of the major problems of people not fully understanding the best practices that can be helpful for everyone is that the information sharing is only in-house in the industry. There are many successful companies that have a bi-directional data sharing plans where they even share their benchmarking data with the competitors to mutually benefit from the programs. So, the predictive maintenance programs for greater plant productivity are trending and people need to avail its benefits any way they can.

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