The RELIABILITY Conference - 44:08
by Alan Katchmar, Strategic Technologies, Inc.
The Fourth Industrial Revolution does not only change what we are doing but it also changes us. We need a value shift and change how way we collaborate on every level. It will fundamentally alter the way we live, work, and relate to one another, how we generate, supply, and move energy around and interact with machines. The Fourth Industrial Revolution (and how we respond to it) will lead to better productivity, improved safety, reliability, and quality. Five key factors are changing modern businesses:
Hyper-connected products
Supercomputing analytical tools
Cloud computing platforms
Smart technology
Cybersecurity solutions
For industry this means real time insights, which enable virtual tracking of assets, processes, resources and products to optimize and automate. As more manufacturers employ smart processes into workflows the amount of waste, energy, and unplanned downtime is forecasted to decrease.
The challenges of the Fourth Industrial Revolution require a Fourth Generation Maintenance. John Moubray wrote about the Third Generation Maintenance - Growing Expectations of Maintenance, The Changing Views of Equipment Failure, and Changing Maintenance Techniques. Similar to how the Fourth Industrial Revolution is building on the third, Aladon took the foundation of the third generation maintenance and lessons learned over thirty years in industry and developed a robust Fourth Generation Maintenance methodology which recognizes the shift in demographics, more changing expectations (outcome based), Asset Performance Monitoring and Predictive Analytics (IoT), Mobility (World in Motion), and Defect Elimination all to meet the challenges the Fourth Industrial Revolution bring.
According to Marius Basson from Aladon, the Fourth Generation Maintenance will bring about the same change in how Industry views maintenance when compared to Industry’s response after Nowlan and Heap released the report called Reliability-centered Maintenance in 1978. However, the velocity, scope, and impact of the Fourth Generation Maintenance are exponentially faster than the generations passed.
