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This Maintenance Management article series introduces and discusses maintenance management strategies, systems and processes for optimizing plant and equipment maintenance, maximizing equipment uptime, and for minimizing operating costs.
This Maintenance Management series aims to provide reputed, useful content that improves an operation’s and organization’s maintenance effectiveness.
The Maintenance Management series of articles are provided with permission of Lifetime Reliability Solutions.
NOTE: The series does not cover related commercial or vendor software or database management applications.
Here is a simple checklist of 31 simple maintenance management tips that you can use to improve your operation. Use it as a guide to start you thinking which maintenance management improvement strategies to use to lower your maintenance and operational costs without spending a lot of money.
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Discover 15 ways to operate so there is less maintenance, fewer maintenance people, lower maintenance costs and (because there is less maintenance) your plant runs reliably for longer! Most of the 15 topics covered are new to operations and maintenance. Each one reduces downtime, save money and improves operating uptime and performance.
Many managers think that high equipment reliability needs a reliability mindset. They think you need the right beliefs and values to get reliability. Reliability requires both correct thinking and correct behaviour, but behaviour is by far the most important. Your plant and machinery will deliver outstanding reliability only if their parts are not heavily stressed. Reliability is the result of properly doing the right actions to the parts in your machines—the right belief comes later, once the evidence is in. You make your machines and equipment reliable; you do not think them into being reliable with a good attitude. You do not need to have the right mindset to get highly reliable machines; you only need to deliver to your machinery parts the right environment for high reliability. If reliability is mostly the result of the behaviours that you do, it means that great reliability can be created everywhere.
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A definition: Maintenance describes the management, control, execution and quality of those activities which will reasonably ensure that design levels of availability and performance of assets are achieved in order to meet business objectives. [Read more…]
The purpose of training your people is to develop capabilities the business needs and to add value to your people so they feel that they have greater worth. But the most important benefit of training is often lost because managers do not get their newly trained people to improve the system of work with their better knowledge and skills.
Everyone needs training to reach their highest potential. Training introduces new ideas and new ways that make us more effective people. There is one vital issue managers need to keep in mind about training if you want to get the greatest returns from the investment in time, money and commitment. Only training put to use returns value and only training of value is of use.
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When you run machines above design rates that decision goes against all that we know about creating high plant uptime and outstanding equipment reliability—in fatigue situations 10% additional stress will cost you ten breakdowns.
The dominate factor in machine life and production plant uptime is the stress in your machines’ working parts. The stress developed in a part’s material of construction microstructure is directly linked to the force applied to it. It does not matter where the force comes from or why it is applied, once the stress in your parts go beyond their microstructure limits your machines fail. If you want to run at high production rates first ensure that your working parts cannot become overstressed.
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Focus on failure elimination, otherwise equipment failures never stop because they are forever being introduced and perpetuated by poor procedures and practices, poor quality control and poor business management systems.
Knowing defects cause future equipment failures, production downtime, unnecessary costs and lost profits, it is necessary to put defect elimination strategies into place to purposely stop defects occurring and to remove the defects that are already present.
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Companies that want plant and equipment reliability need to engage the people in the workplace and give them a large degree of responsibility for improving the performance of their equipment. The most successful solution yet discovered to do that is the autonomous work team.
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Equipment and machinery reliability grows as machines are made more accurately and components kept in more perfect condition. Finesse and refinement practised on equipment parts extends equipment life by months, sometimes many months. Once you reach superb precision and work quality control your reliability growth bounds forward by years at a time. Conversely, when assembly accuracy is poor or parts’ environments are degraded you lose reliability at a rate of years at a time. In fact, the rate at which you lose reliability when component health is lost is as if you threw your machine from a cliff. Many industrial companies blindly commit industrial suicide daily by leaping off ‘reliability cliffs’.
Is your Maintenance at 100% performance in delivering all the six business purposes shown in Figure 1?
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It’s easy to lose your way in maintenance, reliability and enterprise asset management. Without a vision you are aimless. Without a map you are lost. To get maintenance, reliability and enterprise asset management success you must have both the right vision and the correct path to it.
The only true way to prevent asset failure is to prevent the causes of microstructure failure from occurring.
Machines fail when their component’s microstructure is degraded or deformed to a point where it can no longer bear the load. If you prevent degradation and deformation from occurring a machine and its components will provide an exceptional lifetime. However, you must do this at every phase of the asset’s life cycle to get world class reliability.
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In a minute you’ll know if your organisation has what it takes to achieve world class reliability performance. Use this audit tool to gauge your organisation’s capability to deliver outstanding reliability. Use its scale to plan how to improve it.
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This job description begins detailing the attributes, skills and knowledge required for a person to competently do the duties of a maintenance planner focused on improving equipment reliability. It uses an outcomes approach to set the standards that must be reached in the performance of the work. It leaves the person doing the job the flexibility and initiative to find their own way to reach those standards.
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I have led internal maintenance teams towards world class reliability, I have outsourced specialized maintenance functions (predictive technologies) and I have worked with companies outsourcing all maintenance.
Maintenance outsourcing continues to grow with 65% of large companies outsourcing some maintenance..but perhaps for the wrong reasons.
