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In the material handling industry, maintaining your conveyor system properly is key to the longevity of the system. As it is with most industries, there are generally two types of maintenance: Preventative Maintenance and Reactive Maintenance.

Preventative maintenance requires proper maintenance techniques, timely system checks, and scheduled downtime to fix trouble areas. Proper maintenance techniques may take a conveyor system well beyond a Company’s estimated return on investment and also prevent or minimize emergency downtime costs. Reactive maintenance does not require much at all. An improperly maintained conveyor investment likely will not and will age much faster than a properly maintained system.

Preventative Maintenance is the act of performing routing maintenance with the goal of limiting the likelihood of reducing failure and unexpected downtime while prolonging conveyor life. This is done by scheduling a daily walkthrough, along with weekly, monthly & quarterly specific conveyor item checks and scheduling repair before failure.

Failure to plan is a plan to fail. All material handling companies that TriFactor works with issue Operation Manuals on all the conveyors that they produce and inside that manual is a recommended preventive maintenance chart. This is to assist the system owner in maintenance planning. See the below example.

Getting the time to do preventive maintenance can be a balancing act with the Operations team if they are running 24/7. Luckily some of the preventative maintenance items can be done while the system is running; this includes walking the system and listening to the hum. While this may seem like an odd thing to do, each system has a distinct hum and one can recognize a change in the hum and pinpoint a potential part failure and then schedule a time to repair or replace.

Daily walkthroughs help by finding items such as trash buildup (shown below). A simple clean-up of this trash would help keep the o-rings from stretching or wearing out prematurely.   O-rings such as these turn gray when stretched, it would be easy to see during a walkthrough. Plans to swap out these o-rings could be made in the future when the system or this area is down.

Other items that can be done while the system is running are the lubrication of seals and bearings. The beauty of this work being done while the system is running is that the area can be scheduled on a different day and not all at once. The remaining items will require some amount of downtime.

Years ago, maintenance technicians kept notes and/or notebooks on their conveyors to plan preventive maintenance and to track common failures across their systems. In today’s world, there are several software systems available that assist the maintenance and operations teams in planning their next preventive maintenance work and tracking the work completed.

Reducing maintenance costs is a must in every system and while having a maintenance team and a collection of spare parts is a maintenance cost, it should be an acceptable cost versus system failure requiring emergency parts and maintenance personnel flown in from somewhere. This can be a costly endeavor. Planning on work to be done and then completing the work on schedule can greatly reduce the loss of business costs due to unplanned downtime.

Reactive Maintenance is the response to the system at equipment failure. This type of maintenance focuses on repairs after failure and works to get the system back as close to normal. There are two kinds of Reactive Maintenance; the first is preventative maintenance has been completed and the part just failed. Proper preparation by having the part(s) on hand and planning can typically minimize the first type of reactive maintenance.

The second kind of Reactive Maintenance is a lack of preventative maintenance or any maintenance and the system fails due to this. Imagine never changing the oil in your car and now the motor has seized at 40k miles (for example) and now you are stuck with replacing the entire engine or buying a new car; both of which would be costly.

Emergency costs to repair and replace are not the only costs associated with a parts failure. This type of maintenance is not recommended as the loss of business costs while the system is down should also be added to this calculation. Using the car example, not only is the vehicle down, but you now must find another mode of transportation to and from your home to work. On average, the manufacturing industry loses approximately $50 billion a year in unplanned downtime due to system failure.

Equipment that is not maintained properly ages faster than equipment that is maintained.   Did you know that aging equipment causes 44% of the unscheduled downtime?

Failures, such as pictured below, where the reducer lubrication has leaked out. The reducer then heated up and stopped. This caused the downstream system to starve from a lack of product while the repair was made.  In this case, the customer had a spare reducer, and the system was up fairly quickly. If the reducer was not on hand, this system owner would have to have moved their product by hand from the conveyor upstream to their dock doors for shipping, possibly calling on extra resources to do so. The cost of failure on a system that has not been maintained could be rather high. This cost could be as much as eight times the cost of a preventative maintenance plan; up to eight times the cost of having a preventative maintenance plan.

In either case, TriFactor and LGSTX can help. The LGSTX call center operates 24/7 and they have over 600 maintenance personnel worldwide. LGSTX can dispatch personnel to your facility in case of an emergency or schedule a preventive maintenance session.

TriFactor & LGSTX can also provide a system audit. Using a checklist, the technician will go through each conveyor in the system to determine the condition of the motor, reducer, chain, sprockets, etc. These items will then be reported to the system owner to be used as means of maintenance planning and training of their maintenance team.

Their maintenance technicians specialize in material handling repair and maintenance of the system.

TriFactor recommends that the facility’s maintenance team follow the operations manual of each type of conveyor that is in their system as well as daily walkthroughs.