Where the digital revolution meets equipment maintenance in laundries
How does maintenance look in your laundry? Is it simple visual inspection, say, for leaks? Or perhaps more thorough, monitoring equipment operation and using instruments to measure critical functions? Or does it mainly happen when an alarm sounds?
Sometimes maintenance work is largely on hold simply because a laundry can’t find the technical engineers for the job, the ones who have the knowledge, experience and intuition to judge when a piece of equipments needs seeing to.
However, when maintenance is neglected, machine downtime is the sad and almost inevitable consequence. Given the tight production planning in most laundries, equipment downtime throws schedules into disarray and has a high cost for the business: production disrupted, potentially right through the process, possibly deadlines missed with, worst case, penalty clauses as a result, idle operatives, these costs mount up very quickly indeed.
The digital age provides some very new solutions to equipment maintenance questions.
As sensors have become smaller, cheaper and more accurate, it has become very simple to measure all sorts of machine functions. Manufacturers who think carefully about the needs of equipment users put sensors in all the right places.
As storing and communicating lots of data has fallen hugely in cost, so it has become possible to easily manage all the data produced by the many sensors in equipment. It does mean that equipment must be internet connected, luckily safety protocols have improved enormously in recent years, as has cyber awareness. Enabling internet connection of laundry equipment is becoming the norm, allowing faster and more extensive remote technical support for laundries, for one.
However, there’s more.
The availability of large amounts of machine operating data allows much more advanced analysis by manufacturers of how laundry equipment is performing. And analysis of data from not just one but from many equipment owners can bring exciting new insights for everybody – the wisdom of the crowd.
The next crucial step is to make the insights from all this data available to laundries in a way that makes sense for them and that enables the best equipment maintenance of all, maintenance before things go wrong but not unless needed: predictive maintenance.
So predictive maintenance means real time monitoring of laundry equipment, with alerts based on predictive techniques, giving equipment users maintenance prompts at the optimal moment. More uptime, greater reliability, reduced costs.
Technical expertise is still very much needed in laundries to carry out the maintenance, but using digital tools means that the engineer’s time and expertise can be used in a more effective and efficient way. This is even more crucial if you have the challenge of experienced service engineers retiring in the near future. Laundries don’t have to start from scratch either. Many equipment manufacturers are already thinking about how they can help laundries harness the digital revolution.
If your laundry has Wientjens water and energy recycling equipment and you’d like to learn more about our Cloud 4.0 dashboards, where you can see both your equipment data and the important alerts from that data, then do contact us, we’re dying to explain it to you!
