Any industrial manager will tell you that the mere thought of machinery or equipment downtime is enough to strike fear in him. This is because such downtime is associated with potential loss of production as well as the cost of repair and replacement. Of course, such costs may end up hitting the bottom line really hard depending on how significant they are.

Impact on the Bottom Line

Despite this threat, many production line managers and directors often cite budget constraints as the real reason behind equipment failures and outages. On estimate, machinery breakdowns can account for anything between 30 and 40% of the reported profits in costs particularly in heavy industrial environments.

While equipment failure is a huge worry for businessmen and technicians in industrial setups, the cost of maintaining plant and equipment is often higher and requires a huge amount of resources. With the financial constraints in budgeting, companies are dying to find a solution that will save them not just money, but also time.

Machinery vibration for instance, is cited as one of the major causes of equipment failure. That said, there is no machine that can operate without some form of vibration. However, excessive levels of vibration can interfere with how the machines works and to some extent may lead to equipment failure or degradation. If the affected machine is closer to other equipment, it may also affect them.

There are many factors responsible for vibration excitations some of which include:

  • Changes in machine weight which causes overloading
  • Higher vibration input caused by aging effects of the machine
  • The nature of the operating environment

All these instances of vibration excitations can lead to machine breakdown, failure, and fatigue. As a matter of fact, excessively vibrating machines tend to speed up components breakdowns as well as misalignment of equipment.

Installation of Quality Anti Vibration Mounts

In order to curb this problem, it is recommended that the selection of anti vibration mounts be done right from the outset instead of having to reverse engineer them later on. This is because constraints with respect to connections and space availability can bring about prohibitive costs in the modifications required for the mount installation.

Where an anti-vibration solution is not fitted until the machinery starts running and problems emerge, the replacements, repairs, and maintenance required will be expensive.

Monitoring and Maintenance

Once the right components are installed in your machine, the next point to factor in is the ongoing monitoring and maintenance. Insofar as maintenance managers can be guaranteed of machinery effectiveness once high-quality parts have been installed, there are other areas that may affect the operation efficiency of the equipment.

In order to put this under control, condition monitoring is required as this reduces the likelihood of failure as well as prompts the managers when to order parts well in advance before they wear out. The anti vibration mounts must be visually inspected periodically for any signs of damage or degradation. You can use vibration monitoring tools which are largely inexpensive and simple to use.

Therefore, the limitation imposed by financial constraints should not prevent managers and engineers from considering the global impact of machinery and equipment downtime. Always, quality components should be used and the equipment should be monitored and regularly maintained.