Prevention is better than cure

At this year's MAINTEC 2011 exhibition at the NEC, Schaeffler (UK) Ltd (stand D3) will showcase a comprehensive range of products and services for the maintenance and condition monitoring of plant and machinery. Visitors to the stand will have the opportunity to see how these products and services can help improve machine availability, minimise plant downtime and reduce overall maintenance costs.

Most companies work in a breakdown culture, which is reactive rather than proactive. Rather than boasting about how rapidly they can get a machine back into production, maintenance engineers need to ask themselves 'How can we prevent the problems occurring in the first place?'

The theme of Schaeffler's stand this year is therefore 'Prevention Is Better Than Cure'. Although the cost of a machine component such as a bearing is very small compared to the total cost of the machine, the cost of production downtime and any consequential losses as a result of the bearing failure, are often significant.

Manufacturers therefore need to ensure that their high value plant and machinery are adequately insured against the cost of any unforeseen breakdowns. Schaeffler suggests using a risk management approach for this, whereby risk assessments are carried out regularly to see what effect breakdowns would have on critical, bottleneck machines and equipment.

Schaeffler will be holding two seminars at MAINTEC 2011. The “Health Insurance for your plant & machinery” and “Understanding Condition Monitoring is as easy as ABC” Learnshops will give delegates the opportunity to learn why condition monitoring is vital to today's processing and manufacturing industries. Actual UK case studies will be presented to illustrate the savings that can be made from using CM tools and techniques.