Best Practices: Mining data to improve downtime

Data collection and analysis can be used in a variety of ways, but for this column I would like to focus on maintenance. Though maintenance may not seem as exciting as all the other production improvement possibilities, I find maintenance to be an often overlooked aspect of manufacturing which can lead to costly, unscheduled downtime and quickly swamp any incremental gains in production improvements.

Maintenance programs tend to fall into one of three categories.

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