u/aaa_stns

We run a heavy manufacturing facility and have a bit over 70 machines in operation. Large gantry mills, horizontal boring mills, milling machines, bending, laser cutting, lathes, heavy fabrication equipment, etc.

A few years ago we got tired of tracking maintenance in spreadsheets and relying on whoever happened to remember when a machine was last serviced.

Also having three peaceful weeks in a row, and then in the fourth week the machines decide to shut themselves down simultaneously is the most annoying thing I ever witnessed. Time is money…

So we started building our own system in-house.

Nothing fancy from a marketing perspective. Just a tool we actually use every day.

For a pilot project we instrumented one of our Waldrich Coburg gantry mills with sensors on critical systems. We collect vibration, temperature, pressure and other signals. Data is gathered through a Raspberry Pi and sent to a web application we built in React.

On top of that we have the maintenance history, operating hours, repair records and overhaul history for the machine.

Over time we started adding logic and formulas based on our maintenance experience and machine history.

Today we use it to:
monitor machine condition
track operating hours
receive warnings when parameters drift outside normal ranges
schedule preventive maintenance
plan corrective repairs
plan major overhauls
keep maintenance history in one place

The biggest benefit so far is not even the predictive part. It’s having everything centralized and knowing exactly what is happening across the shop floor.

The original goal was never to create a product. It was simply to solve our own problem.

Now I’m curious whether this is actually useful outside our company.

For people working in manufacturing, maintenance or reliability:
Would your company look at a system like this?
What are you currently using?
Would you trust a smaller independent solution or only something from Siemens / SKF / ABB / etc.?
What would be the biggest reason not to buy it?

Trying to figure out if this is just a useful internal tool or if there’s a real business behind it.

Thanks a lot to everyone for your patience to read it. I wish you a great summer ahead!