Getting the bigger picture on bearings
After three years as a local SKF Certified Maintenance Partner, ERIKS has been appointed the company’s first ever CMP with full UK coverage – meaning that wherever you are, you now have access to a first-class tailored condition monitoring service for your bearings on critical machinery.
SKF and ERIKS recognise that effective monitoring of bearing condition provides an excellent indicator of the wider machine condition, and analysis of bearing vibration can highlight and help pinpoint potential problems. It can also give an early warning of potential points of failure, enabling you to plan for downtime and maintenance rather than taking costly reactive measures after the event.
To help keep a close eye on your bearings, ERIKS has no fewer than 32 Certified Vibration Analysts in the field, working from over 70 branch locations and 23 workshops nationwide. Through the SKF CMP service, they make high-level analysis available even to smaller customers who would otherwise be unable to access the advanced technology. In fact, even if you have just one critical machine on a small production or process site, ERIKS can provide the service to help you spot problems, avoid downtime, and increase productivity.
The CMP programme is provided as part of ERIKS own Technical Services offering, which covers a number of important steps to help customers achieve their productivity and profitability goals.
Starting with a consultation which reviews high risk, performance-critical areas to identify savings and improvement potential, the service then goes on to make recommendations for implementation. Then ERIKS’ engineers – either on their own or in conjunction with the customer’s team – supply, install and commission the appropriate solutions.
Last but not least, ERIKS also offers a range of ongoing support services – from reliability review meetings to best practice advice.
As ERIKS Commercial Director Alan Whetstone explains: “As the only National SKF Certified Maintenance Partner, and in tandem with our own Technical Services, we endeavour to help our customers ensure operational and maintenance best practice is achieved. We have 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.”
Signing up to an SKF CMP Proactive Maintenance Programme from ERIKS doesn’t mean signing up to expensive solutions. Any recommendations to help reduce downtime and energy use, and improve reliability, are prioritised, leaving the customer free to take the most urgent steps and the ones which will achieve the quickest cost savings through reduced maintenance or process improvement.
A preventative maintenance strategy will also be recommended, to make sure any retroactive work, repairs or replacements are successful and effective in the long-term too.
This combination of ERIKS know-how and SKF expertise means that – on a cost benefit basis – the SKF Certified Maintenance Partner Programme offers the best value route to a highly skilled, professional team, together with a carefully tailored approach to achieving the customer’s goals. The result is enhanced performance and productivity, reduced maintenance costs, energy use and production downtime, and a customer free to concentrate on core business areas with confidence, while critical bearings are expertly taken care of.
It’s an attractive picture, and one which is now available nationwide, exclusively through ERIKS and SKF.