Drives, like cars, work best when fully serviced and maintained, but can servicing your drives really lead to an improvement in their performance and extend their working life?
EDC's engineers found that as drives progressed through their life-cycle, more and more were coming into our workshop for minor repairs. Although the repairs weren't costly they still meant the vsd was out of action, and as a result a site's production had been disrupted.....so EDC started a programme: we called it Drivecare.
This new programme would involve a fully-trained vsd engineer attending a customer's site and servicing the drives; cleaning and inspecting them, recording parameters and replacing consumables such as filter material. The programme proved to be a hit - especially with companies where production was critical - and soon our engineers found themselves servicing over 100 drives in a 10 day period in one plant alone.
During the first year of their vsd service contract this same customer sent us 5 drives for repair. During their second year they sent none. As a result the chief maintenance engineer has seen less down time, fewer lost production hours and has more time to concentrate on other site issues and projects. In fact, after a number of years on this particular ongoing service contract, the customer now has drives which are considered to be 'legacy' drives - vsds which are obsolete and will be replaced by new drives when they fail - which may still be some time off.
As the saying goes: If you're a maintenance engineer on a site where there's little for you to do - you know you're on a well-run site.....
Servicing your vsds can not only extend their working life and enhance their performance, it can also save you production time and man hours, getting the best from your OPEX budget and freeing your staff to do the jobs you hired them to do. For more information on EDC's Drivecare contracts call 0141 812 3222.