b'Partner News Autumn 2021 35CorporateTop predictions for Royal Mail MaintenanceRoyal Mails central maintenance team aremaintenance solution. These includedspeeds to help pinpoint the relevant enjoying the success of a recently introducedhand-held and fixed on-line accelerometers,vibrations, we found that not only did the initiative, to improve the reliability of theirthermography and the automated analysis ofsensors pick up problems within the motor fleet of TOP2000 large letter sortingexisting machine operation logfiles. gearbox but also gave good indications of machines. when other components of the drive system Consideration was given to criteria such aswere going out of adjustment.25 of these machines across the networktechnical capabilities, user interface and of automated mail centres each provide theability to integrate with existing nationalSince the introduction of the new system, address reading and sorting capabilities ofIT and network infrastructure. The finalthe national fleet of TOP2000 machines have up-to 42,000 mail items every hour, meaningsolution involved the fitting of Schaefflersexperienced zero unpredicted failures of just a small amount of lost service canSmartCheck devices to continuously monitorthese motors.heavily impact the business requirements toand analyse vibration. This is combined with provide a first-class quality of service to theirtrending of data from logfiles on all machines,Manoj Vadher, Head of Central Engineering customers. all controlled centrally at the Leeds incidentfor Royal Mail says: This investigation and monitoring centre. project has given very visible and rewarding Fault data analysis and root cause analysisresults to our focus on addressing and from large failures on these machinesIncident SME, Tim Brook, who led the projectpreventing all failures in the automated showed that the four main motor-gearboxsaid: Initially we were concerned that, due toprocessing of mail.units had the largest impact on downtime.the relatively small size of the motors in our This provided the key focus for activities tospecific application, it would be difficult to address these unexpected failures. get any benefit from this kind of monitoring. A range of technologies were testedHowever, as we developed an understandingTim Brook, Incident SME in the Automation Helpdesk Team, observes the condition of critical for suitability to provide a predictiveof using specific frequency ranges andassets in the Leeds monitoring centre.'