The Advantages of Predictive Maintenance

Last year saw billions of dollars in continuing industry consolidation, including Johnson & Johnson’s sale of LifeScan, Medtronic’s acquisition of Mazor Robotics, and Boston Scientific’s purchase of BTG. Consolidation can bring big opportunities—but only when operations are integrated and optimized to keep the production lines running smoothly. Facilities and equipment maintenance often aren’t top of mind following a consolidation, but they should be. Introducing next-generation maintenance strategies can help a newly combined organization deliver products to market quickly.
 
Done poorly, facility and production equipment maintenance can disrupt even the largest organization, and bring disaster to smaller enterprises. That’s why some medical device companies have begun partnering with industry-specialist facilities management (FM) companies to bring a next-generation predictive maintenance strategy to their operations. Used by leading FM organizations, predictive maintenance keeps buildings and production lines running smoothly, extends equipment life, reduces the risk of shutdowns and helps drive profits. 
 
Where traditional maintenance relies upon visual inspections and preset schedules, predictive maintenance uses sophisticated analytical techniques—think accelerometers for vibration analysis, thermography, tribology, sonic listening devices, and the like—to monitor equipment performance. Excessive vibration, for instance, can indicate a failing fan belt, loose bolt or screw, or other malfunction. Thermography uses heat mapping technology to reveal heat loss and gain, and also can be used to quickly detect abnormal temperature variations in electrical equipment that the human eye can’t see.
 
A truly up-to-date predictive and preventative maintenance process documents maintenance activities and outcomes; runs predictive analyses; and monitors systemwide performance to stay ahead of operating trends. It alerts the team when the need for repairs is evident and recommends design and equipment modification to prevent a slowdown in production before it even occurs.
 
Many Moving Parts, One Strategy
Today’s building operating systems are complex, and medical device production lines equally so. A single component failure that goes undetected can create a domino effect, impacting every process and procedure to the point of a complete building shutdown. More than ever, facility managers must move beyond maintenance schedules that rely primarily on manufacturer recommendations or a repair calendar developed by staff engineers—and adopt the predictive, preventative approach.
 
Traditional maintenance practices can inadvertently raise costs in two ways. One, equipment is typically replaced according to a schedule rather than on the basis of usage, thus incurring unnecessary expense. Two, equipment in heavy use may malfunction or even fail earlier than expected, creating a costly disruption.
 
Instead, facility managers should use policies and procedures that utilize monitoring data, and common sense, to predict with a high degree of accuracy when repairs or replacements will be necessary. In a nutshell, that means determining the optimum schedule of maintenance tasks to be performed on systems and equipment, with documented rationales for each task. Maintenance requirements should be measured against regulatory, economic and technical requirements so that every piece of equipment, the parts that comprise them, and the people who run them, perform properly, safely, and at full efficiency.
 
The preventative approach is an adaptive process that flags potential failures on the basis of operating trends and experience. Should failures occur, the facilities team should  conduct an in-depth analysis of the failure to identify the root cause. With documentation of every monitor reading maintenance activity and failure analysis, building engineers can draw from past experience with a specific building or production line to anticipate and prevent issues from arising.
 
For instance, a manufacturer or conventional wisdom may recommend that a piece of equipment or machinery be replaced every two years. Undoubtedly, following this recommendation may prevent equipment failure. Yet, it may also be more costly than necessary.
 
In contrast, through ongoing equipment performance monitoring, record-keeping and timely maintenance, a building engineer could potentially extend the equipment’s lifespan beyond two years. By adopting the predictive maintenance approach for every critical piece of equipment, the engineering team ensures that the equipment is working properly for as long as possible and avoids premature capital expenditures.  
 
In a real-life example, a major telecommunications company participated in a study to determine whether the investment in preventative maintenance would pay off. For instance, if an air compressor was 10 years old, would it make sense to automatically replace the compressor or utilize preventive maintenance and, perhaps, realize additional years of uninterrupted use? Analysis determined that the compressor would last 20 years with preventative maintenance versus 16 years without it. Four additional years of reliable and efficient use is no small matter, especially if it means big savings in terms of repair or replacement costs.
 
Affordable Tech Drives Predictive Maintenance
Other drawbacks of traditional maintenance practices include manufacturer recommendations that are not aligned with actual experience and may be overly cautious. Maintenance procedures may also be outdated and, if they are based solely on internal policies, may have been based on faulty assumptions to begin with. Sometimes, over-servicing equipment can be as detrimental to its productive life as under-servicing it.
 
Until fairly recently, the cost of installing sensors, accelerometers, and other monitoring technology on all facilities equipment was cost-prohibitive for most organizations. Now, more affordable technology, including wireless monitors, is available that allows predictive maintenance to be implemented for almost every system, and the advent of smart building systems, artificial intelligence, and the Internet of things has only advanced monitoring capabilities and the adoption of predictive maintenance.
 
Better yet, adaptation to these technologies is not confined to new facilities and equipment. Older machines, some with lifecycles of up to 60 years, can often be easily integrated into a predictive maintenance system.
 
Spend Less, but Spend Wisely
Why make a repair or replace equipment sooner than you have to—or later than you should have, increasing costs and the risk of disrupted production? Smart industry leaders are making full use of predictive, preventative maintenance strategies to improve productivity and reduce or eliminate downtime.
 
Leading facility management experts have long used wireless sensors and other monitoring technologies to keep buildings and production lines running smoothly and efficiently, enabling the medical product organization to reliably deliver products to market. As medical device industry consolidation continues, finding better ways to maintain increasingly sophisticated building systems and manufacturing environments will help companies of all sizes deliver new innovations to the marketplace as quickly as possible.

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A former corporate real estate executive at Merck, Roger Humphrey is division president, Industries, JLL where he guides a team that helps medical device, pharmaceutical and biotech companies reduce costs and boost productivity throughout their real estate and facilities portfolios.