Machine tool maintenance covers the inspection, lubrication, calibration, and component replacement work needed to keep production equipment, mills, lathes, presses, grinders, and injection molders, running within spec across their full service life. Unlike a single-machine maintenance plan, a machine tool maintenance program has to account for very different failure modes across equipment types: a stamping press wears differently than a CNC lathe, and a grinder's wheel dressing schedule has nothing in common with an injection molder's hydraulic service interval. Most shops still default to a single calendar-based interval across all of it, which fits none of the equipment well.
This guide is for maintenance managers and plant leaders responsible for a mixed fleet of machine tools. Below is how maintenance needs differ by machine type, the core program structure that works across a mixed floor, and how usage-based scheduling replaces a one-size-fits-all calendar.
A maintenance program covering a mixed fleet needs a consistent structure even though the specific tasks differ by machine type. That structure generally includes:
A fixed calendar interval, service every machine every quarter, ignores that different machines in the same fleet wear at completely different rates. A press running three shifts on a high-volume job accumulates stroke count far faster than a CNC lathe running short-run prototype work, but a calendar schedule services them on the same interval anyway. Across a mixed fleet, this problem compounds: some machines get serviced too late because they're wearing faster than the calendar assumes, while others get serviced too often because they're barely running.
The fix is scheduling maintenance off the metric that actually drives wear on each machine type, cycle count, stroke count, or run hours, rather than a shared calendar date. That requires the underlying usage data to exist in the first place, which is the piece most shops running paper logs or spreadsheets don't have.
Caddis connects to virtually any electrically powered machine tool, CNC mills, lathes, presses, grinders, and injection molders, through non-invasive current transducers, direct PLC connections, IIoT gateways, or an API, whichever fits a given machine. That connection captures the specific usage metric that matters for each equipment type: cycle counts for CNCs, stroke counts for presses, run hours for conveyors, all flowing into the same platform.
See how the platform connects across different equipment types on the Caddis integrations page.
Yes. A CNC's primary wear points, spindle and ballscrew, have little in common with a stamping press's clutch and die alignment concerns, which is why a single generic maintenance checklist rarely fits a mixed fleet well.
A press's wear tracks closest to stroke count, while a CNC's wear tracks closest to cycle count or run hours. Using the right metric per machine type produces a more accurate maintenance trigger than a shared time-based interval.
Yes, provided the platform can connect to each equipment type and capture the specific usage metric relevant to it. A platform built around a single generic sensor type may struggle to capture stroke count on a press the same way it captures cycle count on a CNC.
A machine tool maintenance program that accounts for how differently each equipment type wears, and schedules service off real usage data instead of a shared calendar, catches problems earlier across the whole fleet. Book a demo to see how Caddis's preventive maintenance module handles a mixed machine tool fleet.
