If you own a production facility, your biggest challenge is keeping up output. People, product quality, and pressure are all under your purview, so automation is a vital part of what you do. You can’t be everywhere.
When those industrial automation solutions are performing well, everything hums along at pace. But when they fall through, the consequences ripple fast. You’ve got stalled lines, wasted product, and unhappy customers, not to mention your downtime costs are liable to climb by the hour.
Over many years working alongside manufacturers and food and beverage producers across New Zealand, we've seen the same failure patterns emerge again and again. The good news is that most of them are entirely preventable. Understanding what causes industrial automation to break down (and what you can do to get ahead of it) is one of the most valuable investments you can make in your operation.
Here are the failures we see more often than others, as well as some practical steps to help you sidestep them at zero hour.
1. Deprioritising preventative maintenance.
This is the big one. All industrial automation solutions are mechanical and electronic by nature. You’ve got an array of motors, sensors, and connections on your floor, all of which can fall victim to the passage of time. Those motors wear out, those connections loosen, and even your software can fall out of step with your needs if the updates are left to the wayside.
With a system as complex as a factory or manufacturing floor, breaks and failures tend to happen at moments of peak stress on the system (i.e. at the worst possible moment, when you really need your system up and running).
The solution isn’t actually complicated, but it does require commitment. As specialists in industrial automation solutions, we always recommend a structured maintenance schedule. Carefully following this schedule keeps your components within their expected service life, so things like lubrication, calibration, and inspections don’t slip past you in the hustle of keeping your company moving.
When your team knows what to look for and when to look for it, you dramatically reduce the chance of an unexpected shutdown catching you flat-footed.
2. Using outdated equipment.
You’ll know by now that technology is one of the fastest-moving components of business, and industrial automation is no exception. Your controllers, drives, and operator interfaces that might have been cutting-edge a decade ago are now past their supported lifespan. Manufacturers stop producing spare parts. Software patches stop coming. And all the while, your risk profile climbs, and climbs, and climbs.
Opening your floor each day with obsolete components will impact how efficient your team is, how reliable your equipment is, and even how secure your floor is. Critical failures are less of an outlier and more of an inevitability; it will happen, but the question is ‘When?’
Even minor faults can become weeks-long stoppages, so it’s important to lean on proactive upgrades for your industrial automation solutions that let you manage any transitions on your own schedule.
3. Poor integration between industrial automation systems.
Many production environments have grown organically over the years. Equipment from different eras, different vendors, and different communication standards ends up on the same floor. That can, unfortunately, create some serious issues when those different industrial automation solutions aren’t properly integrated.
Your data disappears into a black box, you have to engineer manual workarounds, and your system might even start throwing fault conditions with no clear route back to the problem. No single system has the full picture, which means you don’t, either.
Investing in well-designed industrial automation solutions pays back quickly in reduced downtime and better visibility. These are systems that tie your controllers, drives, sensors, and operator interfaces into a coherent, communicating whole. They make it significantly easier to grow as a business, but also to identify the root causes of problems in what is likely becoming an increasingly complex floor.
4. Your operators aren’t trained enough on new systems.
Even the best-designed system can fail when the people operating it don't fully understand it. This is more common than most facility managers expect. Operators may know how to run the line under normal conditions but struggle when something unusual happens, or they might be familiar enough with almost every component (but have vital knowledge missing for a single piece).
This means the small issues go missed and quietly, expensively, become large ones. This is why we say that training goes hand-in-hand with industrial automation solutions. Ongoing updates to systems and inductions for new staff are vital so your operators can understand the “why” behind everything they’re doing.
You might notice that, through all of these failure modes, there’s a single golden thread: reactive approaches cost more than proactive ones. Unplanned stoppage is inherently more expensive because you’ve lost time, production, and even materials that you didn’t account for in your plan. This has a variety of knock-on effects that might get you sweaty under the collar just to think about.
We’ve seen that the facilities that manage industrial automation solutions most effectively are treating their systems as an ongoing organism. They schedule maintenance, plan upgrades as necessary, and stay engaged with their partners to understand their equipment deeply.
And in return, they are rewarded by high-functioning floors that show no sign of stopping any time soon.
Partner with CNC Design for your industrial automation solutions.
At CNC Design, we've spent more than 35 years helping New Zealand manufacturers and food and beverage producers build and maintain industrial automation solutions that are reliable, efficient, and built for the long haul.
Reach out to book a consultation with our in-house automation specialists today.
