Digitized undercarriage inspections are now the industry standard while extracting maximum life out of components is now the new frontier. The benefit is reduced costs of ownership and increased ROI
Undercarriage Inspections are the basic foundation of undercarriage management, but offer little long term value unless components are tracked across their entire life. To track components, requires each component the be uniquely identified within a digital system which then allows the component to be tracked across its entire life whether:
- Its on the same asset for its entire life
- Its position is swapped at midlife – idlers and track rollers
- Its part of a swing chain that moves from machine to machine continually accumulating hours
Tracking components also means tracking the Chains and Track Frames with unique identifying numbers, the entire purpose of which is
- To record components installation
- To Record the inspections results against the individual components
- To Record repairs completed against the individual components
- To Recording the End-of-Life Inspection results
Recording this data provides a complete picture of each components performance within the undercarriage system and then enables the Reliability Engineers to determine:-
- Exactly when and what future maintenance events required
- The component performance in cost per hour
- The average life that can be achieved in the environment it is operating
- The value of wear material lost at end of life when not achieving 100% or> wear
In the world of undercarriage inspections, the old proverb “You can only manage what you can measure” applies as always, and those companies that have a system to manage at this level will have a competitive advantage.
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