Industrial Maintenance Management: Key Aspects

What Is Industrial Maintenance Management?

Maintenance management encompasses a set of adjustments in industrial maintenance processes with an emphasis on the strategic role of the maintenance function. Below, see the main areas of focus.

The three types of industrial maintenance

Predictive Maintenance

The fact that maintenance is inseparable from all industrial processes is undeniable. For this reason, it is essential to emphasize the strategic role of this area and strengthen maintenance measures.

Therefore, never fail to perform periodic estimates and routine inspections of your plant and equipment. Such estimates require a high degree of precision in analyzing the operating conditions of industrial assets.

In an ideal scenario, predictive maintenance never causes changes to the industrial plant; it only provides diagnostics that ensure better management of the maintenance function.

Corrective Maintenance

Another central point of industrial maintenance management is so‑called corrective maintenance. It can be divided into two categories: non‑predictable (or unplanned) and predictable (or planned).

As the name itself suggests, unplanned corrective maintenance is the one that generates the highest costs, since it was not included in the budget and is generally applied to repairs or corrections of broken machines.

The ideal situation is to reduce this type of maintenance to an absolute minimum through the use of predictive maintenance. However, even in well‑structured and well‑planned maintenance management, unexpected events can occur. In this way, production downtime or budgetary impacts on other areas of the business are avoided.

Planned corrective maintenance management, on the other hand, is part of a previously structured inspection and monitoring plan. In some cases, it may even allow for parts to be replaced or for machines to be used until they are fully worn out and reach the end of life.

Preventive Maintenance

Preventive maintenance management focuses on establishing very clearly defined time intervals for monitoring, repairing, and correcting the plant’s machinery.

The focus of this type of maintenance is prevention. When properly organized, preventive maintenance is an excellent ally for avoiding unplanned corrective maintenance.

Is Industrial Maintenance Management a Strategic Tool?

One of the main measures of a company’s success is the so‑called ROI (Return on Investment). This metric is used to measure how much return each type of investment brings to the business.

But how does this apply to industrial maintenance? With good industrial maintenance management, you will avoid bottlenecks in several areas, such as production rate, budget balance, minimization of unplanned events, and process flow. Therefore, with all these improvements, there is naturally a better application of resources.

How Can I Improve the Industrial Maintenance Management Process?

Since the late 1940s, the global industry has come to recognize the importance of high‑quality industrial maintenance management. This process has gradually intensified over the decades.

For this reason, industrial business owners around the world have increasingly invested in preventive and predictive maintenance.

This makes it clear that poorly designed cost‑cutting strategies often lead to much greater losses in the long term.

Of course, cost reduction is an essential measure for increasing business profits. However, real strategic intelligence is the one that supports a long‑term perspective.

Therefore, avoid the temptation to skip a comprehensive maintenance management logistics strategy simply because it appears to be cheaper. This initial saving may result in high expenditures on unplanned corrective maintenance and harm your entire production and profitability.

How Can Technology Support Industrial Maintenance Management?

Our reality is increasingly digitalized, and this creates a range of possibilities.

There are impressive process management software solutions that enhance critical aspects of industrial maintenance management, such as:

• registering data related to maintenance.
• planning the services that will be performed by maintenance.
• tracking maintenance activities.
• scheduling the execution of services through automated controls.
• leveling material, human, and financial resources.
• automatically issuing alerts and documents related to services.
• creating event histories and developing schedules and charts.
• analyzing production losses, calculating costs, and analyzing incidents.
• controlling the consumption of spare parts in inventory and the technicians executing the services.

What Are Industry 4.0 and Maintenance 4.0?

To gain a deeper understanding of industrial maintenance, you need to address two concepts: Industry 4.0 and Maintenance 4.0.

Industry 4.0

Industry 4.0 is considered the Fourth Industrial Revolution. It is a recent, modern concept resulting from global technological evolution that affects society in general and the economy in particular.

Thus, Industry 4.0 encompasses the most important technological innovations in automation, IT, and control when applied to industrial production or manufacturing processes. It is mainly characterized by the decentralization of processes, as decisions can be made by the autonomous system itself.

Therefore, these processes are becoming increasingly efficient, customizable, and autonomous thanks to Cyber‑Physical Systems, the Internet of Services, and the Internet of Things.

The Cyber‑Physical System is, above all, formed by computing elements that collaborate with each other in order to keep certain physical entities under control. Its application is broad, involving the aerospace, automotive, civil infrastructure, energy, manufacturing, chemical process departments, and so on.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a network of physical objects, buildings, vehicles, and other elements that have embedded technology, sensors, and internet connectivity, enabling them to collect and transmit data.

The Internet of Services (IoS) consists of the practice of linking services to the IoT or of the IoT generating services that are connected to it.

Principles

Industry 4.0 is based on the following principles: real‑time operation capability; decentralization; virtualization (a virtual copy of plants); modularity (production based on modules, according to demand); and service orientation (the IoS concept).

Pillars

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is anchored on three pillars:

• Big Data Analytics (highly complex data structures that use new approaches to collect, analyze, and manage information);
• Internet of Things;
• Security.

Impacts

One of the main impacts of Industry 4.0 is that it will affect (and is already affecting) the market as a whole. As the market becomes more demanding, organizations seek to align each customer’s needs with the product or service provided.

Advanced product customization will be another variable in the production cycle. But smart factories (those that have adopted Industry 4.0) can consider the needs of each customer and, as a result, customize their products and services.

Other impacts relate to research and development in IT security, machine‑to‑machine interaction, and greater reliability in industrial production. Technology resources must evolve enough to adapt organizations to the new emerging industrial model.

Professionals will also need to adapt, since highly optimized automation will create new demands and others will cease to exist. Workers need to develop their skills and know how to work with the diverse technologies used in smart factories.

Predictive Maintenance in Industry 4.0: What It Is and How It Works? 

We have already discussed the importance of predictive maintenance in industrial maintenance. It is a concept that is highly connected to Industry 4.0. This type of maintenance always seeks to predict future scenarios, anticipating problems and, whenever possible, avoiding and eliminating them.

The tools that predict the future complement the monitoring sensors installed on machines. They are:

CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management System)

This tool predicts failures and downtime, allowing maintenance teams to repair production line assets and avoid unplanned interruptions. The information provided by the CMMS supports decision‑making.

Discover Engeman®, a CMMS that helps organizations manage assets, improve maintenance performance, reduce downtime, and make smarter, data-driven decisions.

Digital Controllers

These are controllers used for the programming and operation of machine tools. They allow the analysis of motor data to determine their deterioration state and schedule their replacement.

Monitoring Software

These are applications that report issues in real time, serving as valuable aids in predictive maintenance. For example, if these tools are connected to CMMS applications, they can trigger maintenance requests as soon as a product failure is identified.

We have seen that industrial maintenance has been transforming, mainly driven by the development of predictive maintenance and Industry 4.0. Therefore, organizations must adapt to these new models in order to become more competitive in the domestic market.

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