What is Predictive Maintenance for Cranes and Why Does It Matter?

Maintaining the integrity of your business equipment is something that cannot be overlooked. Not only does faulty equipment result in less efficient work, but it could also cause safety hazards for your employees and customers.

For this reason, predictive maintenance is a practice that business owners frequently implement. This is especially true with more complex equipment, such as cranes.

Let’s explore everything that you need to know.

So, What Exactly Is It?

As the name suggests, predictive maintenance is a proactive measure that involves estimating when certain equipment parts are likely to fail. Research and data are used to determine the average length of time before a failure will occur.

An automotive manufacturer might conclude that a particular vehicle part is likely to fail after 36 months. To prevent this scenario, the part is either replaced or repaired before this time.

Why Does It Matter?

As previously mentioned, predictive maintenance is essential to both productivity and overall safety. If a failure does occur, your business could easily experience a large handful of adverse consequences.

Faulty construction equipment, for example, could cause hundreds of thousands of dollars in property damage. Or, it could result in a significant amount of injury to a large number of people.

In the latter scenario, it’s not uncommon for victims to file a lawsuit against the company responsible for handling the equipment.

Predictive maintenance will go a long way in protecting your company’s reputation. It will also allow you to prevent multiple issues that would otherwise arise.

How Can I Get Started?

Before you can implement predictive maintenance, you need to understand when your equipment is likely to require repair. This is accomplished through consistent research and analysis on the behavior and performance of the equipment.

For example, you could use an electronic sensor on a crane that details the stress that equipment experiences while under load. When this crosses a certain threshold, the equipment would be at risk of failure.

You could use this data to make the necessary repairs or replacements before this value is reached.

Without this type of monitoring, your only alternative would be to service the equipment at specific intervals. For instance, you might choose to repair parts of your equipment every six months to prevent mechanical failure.

The issue here is that problems are likely to arise early on in the process since you won’t know precisely when you should maintain your equipment. So, keep this in mind when developing a method to do so.

Predictive Maintenance Might Seem Complicated to Implement

But the above information will make the process far smoother. From here, you’ll be able to Predictive maintenance to ensure that your equipment operates exactly how it’s supposed to. 

Want to learn more about what we have to offer? Feel free to reach out to us today and see how we can help.

Posted in Crane.