Downtime, standstills, unscheduled maintenance work – a real pain for any production company. If just one component on your machine fails, the efficiency of the entire plant is reduced or the plant might even come to a complete standstill. Efficient condition monitoring allows you to react quickly and keep production downtimes to a minimum.

From manual condition monitoring to predictive maintenance

A production plant consists of hundreds or thousands of components which are responsible for smooth production. This might include robots, motors, and machine tools. The failure of a single component disturbs operations as a whole and reduces the efficiency of the plant. For this reason, the continuous monitoring of the condition of individual components is desirable.
With condition monitoring (CM), the foundation is laid for further applications such as digital twins, a smart factory, or predictive maintenance.

Some (component) manufacturers already presented CM solutions several years back, frequently with the integration of existing controllers (PLCs). However, these are almost always associated with significant initial costs, which means that it only makes sense to use them if the number of components is large. Other manufacturers continue to rely upon traditional interval-based maintenance.

Nonetheless, simple solutions with a good cost-benefit ratio are often available, too. One thing’s certain: A good overview of the technologies and the results that might be achieved is a prerequisite for success. It doesn’t always have to involve machine learning, a big IoT solution with a complex platform and vendor lock-in, or data storage abroad. A sense of proportion is key here.

In order to use condition monitoring successfully, we recommend that you examine the following aspects in advance.