Mike Sondalini — Thought Leader

Maintenance Strategy 202: Develop your equipment maintenance strategy, then develop your equipment maintenance programs

First develop maintenance strategy—what you want to achieve with your equipment maintenance, why it is necessary, and how to do it.

Then turn strategy into the plans to maintain production asset reliability with the equipment maintenance program.

Often maintenance managers and maintenance engineers are asked to develop a maintenance strategy for their plant and equipment. They need to develop a document. In it you explain how you are going to use the least plant and equipment maintenance expenditure and efforts to ensure the necessary production performance from your production plant and equipment.

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Maintenance Strategy 101: Correct Equipment Maintenance Management Strategy Selection makes All the Difference

You select and apply maintenance strategy with the purpose of controlling failure. Your maintenance management starts on the project drawing board. If you only select your maintenance management strategies when the equipment is installed, you will always be fighting a losing battle!

Maintenance is a risk management practice used to maximise production and minimise loss and waste.  Selecting a successful maintenance strategy requires a good knowledge of equipment failure behaviour and maintenance management practices.  Once you appreciate why equipment fails, how equipment fails and when equipment fails you can select the right mix of maintenance strategies to extend and maximise its service and performance.This article takes you through the factors which affect equipment performance and service life.  It also introduces you to the maintenance strategies available to you today and how they work.  You will also discover within the article many maintenance management benefits that each maintenance strategy will bring you.

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Learn Vital Equipment Reliability Basics for Equipment Reliability Management Success

Learning how to run your industrial plant and equipment to get outstanding reliability requires an understanding of its failure mechanisms.

You can have tremendous equipment reliability if you use the right maintenance strategies at the right times during the equipment life cycle to prevent the causes of failure.

Abstract:

Equipment Reliability Basics 101 for Reliability Management. When you understand the behaviour of equipment over its lifetime you will understand why proactive maintenance (as opposed to repairs) is critical. Our technologically based society depends on machinery and equipment to keep it operating. Knowing how equipment behaves during its operating life, and why it fails from time to time, means you can set up the right maintenance strategies to deliver lifetime reliability. Learn to apply the correct ways to use equipment failure curves to select your maintenance strategies. Change your maintenance and operating practices to control and eliminate failure and ensure you deliver outstanding equipment reliability.Keyword:  Keywords: Equipment reliability management, reliability curves, equipment failure curves

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There is a direct connection between the microstructure health of your equipment parts and your operational and business success

There are key concepts and practices that an organization needs to use if they want optimal asset health from their plant and equipment. The greatest successes come when operating and safety risks are eliminated at their root causes. The Plant Wellness Way EAM methodology focuses on getting lasting asset health so world class operating performance is normal in your company day-after-day. Its processes and analysis tools create a system-of-reliability that gets exceptional asset health and delivers the greatest ROI from each operating asset throughout its service life.

Risk is the total losses suffered when any asset’s components may fail. The causes of failure are the environmental and operating stresses that affect a component’s microstructure. This means that world class reliability is the effective, complete remove of the causes of failure, also known as risks, from your operations. [Read more…]

 How do you work-out the right life-cycle maintenance strategies? Does one strategy apply throughout an asset’s life? What influences the choices and decisions as to what maintenance to do and when it should be done? How much money and resources do you expend in the maintenance of an asset? To keep the concepts behind these important questions on maintenance strategy selection simple they are applied to a sheet of paper.

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If you want to drastically reduce maintenance costs, stop lost production, eradicate unplanned outages and equipment breakdowns, you need to stop the continual introduction of defects and errors into your operation.

You do that by using quality management practices to drive continuous improvement of your management systems and so continuously improve the business processes, and your peoples’ knowledge.

Abstract:

To reduce maintenance costs and production downtime it is necessary to reduce the causes of the maintenance and downtime.  Both maintenance and downtime are an effect and not a cause.  The causes can be traced back to defects and errors from a variety of sources.  Knowing that defects eventually lead to future equipment failures, production downtime and lost profits, it is necessary put strategies into place to purposely prevent them occurring in the first place and to eliminate them if they are present.

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Here is a simple checklist of 31 maintenance management tips that you can use to improve your reliability and maintenance results.

Use it as a guide to start you thinking which maintenance management improvement strategies to use to lower your maintenance and operational costs.

The 31 maintenance management tips list below takes the form of a bullet-point list so it can be quickly reviewed. Should you wish more information in detail on any of the 31 maintenance management tips, then please read the PDF article 31 Sure Ways to Lower Operating Assets Maintenance Costs and Improve Reliability. If you have any questions from the article please contact us on the email address shown in the Contact Us page.

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 High equipment reliability is a choice and not an accident of fortune. To a great extent you can choose how long you want between equipment failures. You can deliver high equipment reliability by ensuring the chance of incidents that cause failures of equipment parts are low. The secret to remarkably long and trouble-free equipment lives is to keep parts and components at low stress, within good local environmental conditions, so there is little risk they are unable to handle their design duty. If there is nothing to cause a failure, the failure will not happen and your equipment continues in service at full capacity and full availability. 

For maintenance practitioners, it is the use of precision maintenance backed-up with condition monitoring applied as a tool to prove maintenance work is done precisely, that provides the foundation for exceptional equipment reliability.

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