How Merck Established A Center Of Excellence to Advance Predictive Maintenance Globally

IMC Presentation (44:11)

by Cody Boyd, Merck

With the goal of advancing asset reliability and predictive maintenance (PdM) to enable increasing production targets, multinational pharmaceutical company Merck has established a center of excellence known as the PdM HUB. This HUB provides centralized processes to deploy and sustain predictive maintenance technologies across the global Merck network. This effort enables Merck sites to standardize their PdM processes, leverage a host of tools and technologies for various use cases and take advantage of the HUB’s expertise (rather than develop it locally).

Merck’s journey to establish their PdM HUB started in 2018 with a pilot project involving IoT-based vibration monitoring for critical rotating equipment. To kick-off the project, Merck formed a close-knit partnership between the corporate reliability, corporate IT and site teams to deploy the technology, track successes, share best practices and create a company-wide community of reliability practitioners. After a successful pilot, showing the proof of value for IoT-based vibration monitoring, Merck went on to deploy similar systems at over a dozen sites across North America, Europe and Asia.

Today, Merck continues to deploy more PdM technologies globally in applications like vibration monitoring, ultrasound, thermography and steam trap monitoring. Merck sites have come to rely on the PdM HUB for subject matter expertise and guidance to support their reliability programs. TAKEAWAY: Predictive Maintenance Center of Excellence strategy, including value proposition