Preventative Maintenance vs. Predictive Maintenance

Much like a vehicle needs routine maintenance, so does manufacturing machinery. Preventative Maintenance is a maintenance plan in which a service technician will check your packaging machinery and equipment at regular intervals, to ensure that your packaging lines are running at optimum capacity for your needs. A preventive maintenance visit usually includes a sort of diagnostic check of equipment, and any replacement parts are then changed (or if not in-stock, ordered).

Associated Packaging’s Operational Maintenance Program helps prevent costly interruptions in production and assures the peak performance of your equipment. This packaging machinery maintenance program helps to increase packaging equipment life and longevity. Our packaging maintenance programs are customized to your facility’s needs, and are designed to help keep equipment downtime to a minimum. With regularly scheduled preventative maintenance checks, your machinery and equipment perform at peak performance for longer, which helps extend invested capital dollars.

Predictive Maintenance, according to PMMI, is, “The basic idea…to monitor a machine, or a component on a machine, to determine when it is likely to fail and to take action to stop it, thus avoiding unplanned downtime.” This is a vital definition to understand. This means that predictive maintenance visits are only scheduled when pieces of software (that have been added to your packaging machinery) predict equipment failure. Knowing this information prior to a breakdown can preemptively save a packaging line from costly unplanned downtime.  

Which Types of Packaging Machines Tend to Fail?

According to a PMMI report, some packaging equipment and machinery are more susceptible to downtime more so than others. “When we asked consumer packaged goods companies which types of packaging machines were most likely to fail, we got some interesting results. We split machines likely to suffer downtime into three categories: “extremely likely, “moderately likely,” and “slightly likely.” In the “extremely likely” category, form, fill & seal (FFS) machines are in the lead – with 14.3% of manufacturing managers at consumer packaged goods (CPG) companies rating them as extremely likely to suffer downtime. Next down the list in the “extremely likely” to fail category are labelling, decorating, and coding machines – which were placed in this category by 13.3% of respondents. Interestingly though, when the three categories of likely to fail (extremely, moderately, and slightly) are aggregated, labelling, decorating, and coding machines comes out in the lead as the least reliable type of machine; while FFS machines only make it into third place.”

Predictive Maintenance can become a disruptive, new opportunity for packaging machinery and equipment, and create a competitive edge for CPGs, but Associated Packaging, Inc., can help you determine the best Predictive Maintenance outfit that your packaging production lines need.