ERIKS has been appointed by SKF as the company’s first Certified Maintenance Partner with full UK national coverage, following three year’s work as a local CMP. The ‘National’ status recognises ERIKS’ significant UK footprint in terms of technical support. ERIKS employs 32 Certified Vibration Analysts in the field, working from over 70 branch locations and 23 workshop locations nationwide. This demonstrates the breadth and depth of coverage around the country, putting the service within easy reach of the largest possible number of customers.
The SKF Certified Maintenance Partner (CMP) program was developed to provide a tailored condition monitoring service for bearings on critical machinery, recognising that the ability to effectively monitor bearing condition also provides an excellent indicator of the wider machine condition. Analysis of bearing vibration can highlight and help to pinpoint any number of problems on a machine that can impact on performance and reliability. It can also flag up potential points of failure, allowing planned downtime and maintenance rather than costly reactive measures.
SKF’s specialist monitoring equipment and analysis software allows accurate interpretation of vibration signals, and provides comprehensive recommendations as to any measures that should be taken. A key benefit the CMP service is to make this high-level analysis available to SME customers who wouldn’t otherwise have access to the technology. Even if it is just one critical machine on a small production or process site ERIKS is able to bring the service to that customer on an effective and economic basis.
ERIKS delivers the CMP program as part of its broader Technical Services offering, providing customers with consultancy, supply, installation and commissioning of products, systems and processes. ERIKS Technical Services gives customers the advice, tools and on-going support they need to increase plant and equipment productivity and reliability.
The process typically starts with a consultation, this doesn’t just cover the bearings or machine in question, but looks at the wider context of what the machine does and where it fits into the process. Using critical path analysis and a benchmarking of performance parameters and risk levels, a preventative maintenance strategy can be developed alongside the physical analysis work to make sure the application of any retroactive work, repairs or replacement schedule is successful in the long-term. Using this review process, identifies existing high-risk, performance-critical areas and can be used to prioritise savings or improvement opportunities.
Customers receive a set of recommendations, highlighting opportunities where condition monitoring and analysis could help to reduce downtime, reduce energy and improve reliability, or where ERIKS solutions could increase performance. All of these recommendations will drive cost savings through reduced maintenance or process improvement.
The measures are prioritised into short and medium-term categories for implementation. This becomes the basis for an agreed action plan, incorporating schedules, milestones and completion dates, with ERIKS multi-disciplined engineers working alongside customers’ own engineering teams to install and commission the required solutions.
The result is dramatically increased productivity, process-wide, with ERIKS giving all the training and on-going support that customers need to manage production more effectively, improve reliability and maximise profitability.
ERIKS Technical Services program manager Alan Whetstone comments: “As the only National SKF Certified Maintenance Partner, and in tandem with our own Technical Services, we endeavor to help our customers ensure operational and maintenance best practice is achieved. ERIKS has an unrivalled blend of engineering experience and technical know-how, plus unmatched geographical coverage. Wherever our customers are, they know they can rely on ERIKS to provide the most effective solutions to deliver maximum productivity, the highest levels of reliability and enhanced profitability.”
SKF is a leading global supplier in the areas of bearings, seals, mechatronics, services and lubrication systems. The Group’s service offer includes technical support, maintenance services, engineering consultancy and training. SKF is represented in more than 130 countries and has 15,000 distributor locations worldwide. The Group’s annual sales 2009 were SEK 56,227 million. The number of employees was 41,172.
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