Roberts, Milacron make push for predictive machinery maintenance

Jun 03, 2011 |

Roberts, who came to Milacron from the transportation and locomotive industry, with time in aerospace prior to that, has worked in manufacturing for his entire career, with a focus on aftermarket over that whole time. He sees his job and business unit as being focused on what he calls three key levels: parts, productivity, and predictive.

"You've got to be world class in parts delivery, very high expectations, 24/7, etc.," Roberts said, "but when you move up from parts and replacement, now you're at the productivity level." Roberts said the for Milacron this level is occupied by its Servtek brand, including products like TCS ceramic heater bands for injection and extrusion barrels and VBET screws, which are both intended to optimize processing and boost output.

Predictive, as the name would indicate, is about anticipating issues before they occur and mitigating or eliminating downtime.

"Where we're operating now is really the third level," Roberts said. "Now we want to be about predictive and how do we help the customer with what their real needs are going to be. We've got a lot of really smart customers, and they do very good preventive maintenance programs, but we have some additional data that will complement them. How do we help them have a preventive maintenance program that can be even more advanced. What we're talking about is uptime and the elimination of any business interruption costs from an unscheduled event."

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