Preventive Maintenance and the challenges of qualified Personnel

Preventive Maintenance is one of the golden nuggets of IOT. How does this focus affect the deployment of personnel?

• Efficiencty of personnel: more and better results
• Challenge of scarcity of personnel
• The challenges of the aging engineer

Efficiency of personnel: more and better results

There was and is a lot of attention what sensors can do for preventive maintenance: with preventive maintenance, huge costs of big repair costs are avoided by acting on time. One aspect in this way of thinking, was that existing personnel could work more efficiently. In old days, mechanics and engineers did their regular scheduled rounds of maintenance, where every device got similar time of attention, whether the device was in a bad state or not. Sensors measure the state of maintenance of devices real-time. As such, personnel can give attention to devices which really needs it. By using your existing personnel in this more efficient way, high personnel costs are saved because no other personnel would have been hired.

Challenge of Scarcity of personnel

When Preventive Maintenance became popular some years ago as one of the fields of Internet of Things, the world was still in the last phase of the economic crisis. Industry has in some ways still crisis thought: yes, personnel is hard to find. But they don’t make the connection that efficiency has changed in the guise of ‘cost saver’ to ‘benefit most from opportunities’. Because personnel is so hard to find, industry has to use the available personnel as efficient and effectively as possible. Besides, engineering for infrastructure isn’t a popular study any longer. So, engineers are even harder to find.

With preventive maintenance with the aid of sensors, personnel can give attention to the devices which really needs them.

The challenges of the aging engineer

There is more: most infrastructure has been built 20 years ago. Already, there’s the challenge that those engineers have moved on to other jobs. So, it’s very possible indeed that in a company, nobody knows how this infrastructure works exactly any longer. Last years, a new challenge has come up: those engineers are beginning to retire. That means that a pool of this specific knowledge is already decreasing and will even lessen more in the years to come. Therefore, it is very important to have measures for maintenance in place, before this knowledge has disappeared completely.