A Smarter Approach to Servo Maintenance
When a production line stops unexpectedly, everything behind it collapses—output, delivery schedule, profit, and sometimes the customer relationship. Anyone who has worked around servo-driven machinery knows this pain: a single motor or amplifier fault can freeze an entire process.
Factories have always tried to stay ahead of failures. But the traditional playbook—run it until it breaks or replace parts on a calendar—doesn’t match the realities of today’s high-speed, high-precision production. As machines become more complex, the cost of “not knowing” what’s happening inside a servo system grows quickly.
That gap is what predictive maintenance is designed to close.
From Corrective to Preventive to Predictive
In most factories, servo maintenance still follows two familiar approaches.
Corrective maintenance
Waits for a failure, then reacts.
It’s simple, but a breakdown means unplanned downtime, scrap, and lost output.
Preventative maintenance
Schedules replacements on fixed intervals.
Better—yet still flawed. Parts might be swapped too early, wasting money, or too late, leaving room for unexpected failures between planned service cycles.
Predictive maintenance
However, uses actual operating conditions—temperature drift, power-quality irregularities, encoder communication noise, brake wear behavior—to forecast when a problem will occur before it disrupts production.
In short:
- Preventive: “We replace it because the calendar says so.”
- Predictive: “We replace it because the servo system is telling us something is changing.”
For servo-driven axes where uptime directly impacts throughput, this shift is meaningful.
A Real Factory Challenge: Mixers That Kept Stopping
A food-production site running large mixers faced exactly this dilemma. When a mixer’s motor or amplifier failed, the line didn’t just pause—batches of in-process material became scrap. Each incident carried real financial impact.
The end user asked the machine builder for a mixer that could support predictive maintenance. The challenge: budgets were tight, and complex external sensor systems would have driven cost and development time too high.
The answer came from the servo platform itself.
When the Servo System Becomes the Diagnostic Tool
By using SANMOTION G servo system, the machine builder tapped into the condition-monitoring features already embedded in the motor, encoder, and amplifier:
- Communication-quality monitoring between encoder and drive
- Power-supply quality monitoring to catch instability early
- Holding-brake life prediction based on real load and cycle data
- Built-in environmental toughness (higher vibration resistance, wider heat range from 0 to 60 °C, operation up to 2,000 m)
- Battery-less encoder design, eliminating one of the most common maintenance points
Instead of redesigning the machine around add-on IoT hardware, the mixer gained predictive capability simply by specifying a servo system with intelligence already inside.
For the end user, the outcome was practical and immediate:
fewer surprises, fewer stops, and fewer wasted batches.
Why Predictive Maintenance Is Becoming Standard for Motion Systems
Whether it’s food processing, packaging, semiconductor handling, or any multi-axis industrial machine, servo-driven equipment is being pushed harder than ever. Higher speeds, faster indexing, more temperature cycling, and more frequent duty cycles all stack up.
Downtime is expensive.
Uncertainty is even more expensive.
Predictive maintenance turns servo performance data into early warnings. A slight rise in inverter temperature, irregular encoder communication, minor shifts in brake-holding behavior—these become signals, not mysteries. Maintenance becomes planned instead of reactive, and production managers gain a more stable, predictable schedule.
Where the Servo System Itself Makes the Difference.
For machine builders and engineers aiming to increase both performance and reliability, SANMOTION G brings two advantages together:
- Advanced servo performance
- 3.5 kHz speed frequency response
- 27-bit encoder resolution
- One-third faster settling than the previous generation
- Predictive-ready intelligence built into the drive platform
Condition monitoring is not bolted on—it’s part of the architecture.
A servo system that helps prevent failures is more valuable than one that simply performs well. In modern factories, uptime is the true metric that decides revenue, and predictive maintenance is quickly becoming an expectation rather than an upgrade.
