Maintenance of lines and machines is vital for minimising breakdowns and unplanned downtime. Understanding our customers’ maintenance strategies and how they maintain their PacDrive systems provides critical insight into their operational resilience. This is particularly important where PacDrive M is concerned as legacy hardware constraints often dictate strategy.
Of all the PacDrive maintenance strategies used by our customer base, Preventative Maintenance (82%) was the most common. However, Reactive Maintenance (63%) remained high across the network. This presents a risk to any site as it is dependent upon a number of factors. These include having the requisite knowledge of equipment plus readily available spares. For PacDrive 3 this is less likely to be an issue, but for PacDrive M obsolescence is already having an impact.
Predictive Maintenance (26%) and Asset/Condition Monitoring (35%) are both seemingly still in their infancy. This may in part be due to the investment needed for the necessary equipment as well as people with the ability and skills to analyse the data generated. Ultimately though, this means maintenance teams can potentially remain locked into manual routines rather than following data-driven decision making.
There are a number of underlying factors which may offer some explanation as to why many struggle to move beyond preventative and reactive approaches.
- Platform limitations: PacDrive M was not designed with the advanced data capture capabilities needed for predictive analytics.
- Workforce shortages: skills gaps across engineering departments make it difficult to dedicate staff to advanced maintenance analysis.
- Conflicting production pressures: high-throughput operations reduce the availability of maintenance windows.
- Legacy system constraints: PacDrive M installations are still often part of larger automation networks which have grown over the years. Whilst PacDrive 3 may form a large part of these, limitations are dictated by the availability of the legacy equipment.
- Diagnostic interpretation gaps: several of our respondents did state they had monitoring tools, yet lacked the training required to enable them to convert data into actionable maintenance decisions.
Our survey results clearly show most PacDrive maintenance strategies reside at the planned/preventative stage. The principle reason for this is not generally capital. Instead it is the diagnostic infrastructure together with the necessary technical competency. We view both these as the most impactful areas for increasing site-level resilience.
Proper training can help provide the knowledge to diagnose issues and maintain equipment safely and competently. Machine Analyser® monitors diagnostics to highlight past and potential issues. Combined these have the potential to open the door to predictive maintenance. This means intervention is driven by data, can be better planned and leads to a lower risk of breakdowns and unplanned downtime.