Machinery Configuration

Quick Wins that Optimize Machine Performance

- Paul Farless

The landscape of manufacturing and industrial processes is constantly changing. Historically, titans of industry capitalized on large, cumbersome, overbuilt, sluggish equipment that had to be continuously maintained by a labor force that was paid an incredibly low wage. Modern industry is stressed to operate in a leaner landscape with fewer workers, purpose-built equipment and margins that, in many cases, are razor thin. This leads to improvement activities that get more and more out of less and less: more product and profit out of fewer people and with fewer failures or disruptions to business. In order to do this, practices and equipment both have to evolve to maintain pace with demands.

Fewer items are more scrutinized than the facility's physical assets; we have to make sure they perform how they are supposed to, when they are supposed to, and for however long they are supposed to. For this to happen, many factors have to be balanced, and often the equipment may not be capable of performing to this level in its current state. A higher state of configuration must be achieved — an optimum state that allows maintenance, operations and reliability to perform all necessary checks on the equipment without interrupting its service, all while maintaining or improving the inherent reliability of the piece of equipment.

Changing the configuration of assets or modifying them to improve performance is not a task that should be taken on lightly. To best modify the equipment for performance, we would first have to define how we want the equipment to improve. You can define optimized performance in many areas, and depending on your organizational goals, the changes to the equipment would have to follow suit. What follows are some of the most common reasons for modifying equipment to increase performance.