In a 2006 Nielsen study1, auto industry manufacturing executives reported that stopped production costs averaged $22,000 per minute or $1.3 million per hour of downtime. When surveyed, 53% of the manufacturers agreed that predictive and preventative maintenance was the key to reducing this loss of productivity and revenue. So, what is the best practice for determining how to maintain and operate your manufacturing line to optimize productivity and maximize revenue?

Most engineers can agree that industrial equipment is designed to operate safely within a certain range of conditions, and in a perfect world, would be operated within its predetermined limits. But often, the designed-for conditions and actual operating conditions are worlds apart. This gap between “as designed” and “as operated” often ends with one or more of the following: premature failure, unanticipated downtime, unplanned maintenance, productivity losses, unexpected repair and replacement costs, and lost revenue.

VEXTEC Virtual Life Management® (VLM®) technology predicts the durability of manufactured products by aggregating all the various data sets that describe the product and its behavior. Traditional design analysis today accounts for some of these data, for instance, by looking at the stress imparted on a component. However, stress data alone, is not enough to predict durability which is a function of the materials reaction to that stress. This is what differentiates VLM from traditional methods. By relating all the data that describes the product in one computationally robust platform, VEXTEC VLM simulators give engineers the ability to see how material processing variation, design changes, or changes in the operating conditions affect component durability.

Click here for a case study where an industrial manufacturing company hired VEXTEC to conduct a root failure analysis of their manufacturing line and to evaluate corrective actions to repair the failure and maintain the equipment. The manufacturer estimated that in this one project, VEXTEC saved them over $700,000 in capital investments.

If you would like to evaluate and optimize your manufacturing production or would just like more information on the VLM technology, contact us

 

1 The 2006 study by Nielsen Research is based on 101 manufacturing executives in the automotive industry