During the PreCoM project, the consortium first carried out a progressive identification of critical machines and significant components to be monitored by PreCoM system, definition and determination of the PreCoM system concept and design. The work enabled the consortium to design concretely the PreCoM system and its functionalities, which resulted with 24 (hardware and software) modules connected to a centralised cloud and the overarching ‘PreCoM Brain’ (i.e. the steering rules to secure data flow, interoperability and right recommendations to the end user companies). Second, the consortium developed and adapted the selected modules and technologies for making them interoperable. Third, lab tests of individual modules/technologies and the overall PreCoM were conducted in order to verify and validate them. Finally, the PreCoM system was applied in a 14-month demonstration and validation in three industrial use cases, with continuous monitoring and evaluation of its impact.
The evaluation is summarized below as an average of the impact achieved in the three use cases, based on the components monitored by PreCoM:
- Reduced downtime by about 88%;
- Maintainability (MTTR) improved by about 24%;
- Reduced supervision time in the training for new technicians by about 76%;
- Increased machine overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) by about 5%;
- Applying predictive maintenance by company personnel has been increased from previous level of 0% to about 80%;
- Energy is rationalized by reduction equivalent to about 16%;
- Material loss is reduced by about 16%;
- Work safety was confirmed, as no accidents occurred neither before PreCoM introduction or during PreCoM demonstration;
- Reduced maintenance hours by about 16%;
- The saving in maintenance hours (at minimum) is about 92 hours per year;
- Time to repay the investment (at maximum) is about 1.3 years;
- The expected reduction of maintenance costs in 10 years through reducing maintenance hours is about 190,000 EUR.
Furthermore, we performed a wide dissemination of the PreCoM project and its results. We estimated to have reached over 102,000 people among media and general public (e.g. newspapers, magazines), 36,000 people in the industry ecosystem (through fairs, exhibitions and other events/occasions) and 10,000 people in the scientific community (through scientific papers, presentations at conferences and other events).
We had carried out a comprehensive work for defining exploitable results. In the end, nine IPR results were identified (belonging to different partners), of which three are key results (immediately exploitable). For these latter ones, a complete business plan has been developed.
The PreCoM project has been also part of the Cluster FoF-09 – named ForeSee (
http://foresee-cluster.eu(öffnet in neuem Fenster)) for coordinating EU-funded PdM projects on several activities: working together on standardization issues; developing a road map on PdM; organising a series of dissemination events on PdM.
