Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Improving the reliability of performed maintenance work helps in the refinement and improvement of policies that shape a cost-effective maintenance strategy that aims to address dominant causes of asset failure.
Before we continue, we have to define how reliable maintenance looks like. In the context of this article, we will define it as consistently performing adequate maintenance in the required time frame. In other words, it means performing good maintenance work while respecting due dates.
Many organizations try to improve performance by just creating PM routines and letting the technicians loose to perform the work. Â This often has negative effects on plant performance. Â This has been proven through studies conducted by Ledet at numerous DuPont sites. Â This study looked at the impact of Planning, Scheduling and Preventative Maintenance on Plant Performance.
Ledet had found that by just implementing a PM / PdM program, organizations lost 2.40% of uptime (on a baseline of 83.50%). Â Not quite the results to expect when implementing a strategy to improve plant performance. Â When the PM / PdM program is implemented with Planning & Scheduling, the plant saw an increase of 5.10%. Â Now that is an improvement.
But what about the remaining 11.40% of uptime? Â How does one address the remaining downtime?
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Imagine an operation in which there are no lost time accidents, OEE is increasing and there is a plan to address the skills shortage. These sites do exist and chances are they using procedure based maintenance. Procedure Based Maintenance is simply having all maintenance activities documented in a procedure. These procedures are then followed step by step when conducting breakdown, corrective and preventative maintenance. [Read more…]
How did the PM routines come to be in your business? PM routines are often the result of a failure and the maintenance department being told to implement a PM to prevent it from happening again. The PM is hastily put in place without much detail or thought. Fast forward a little ways in time and soon you have a monster of PM program, in which you struggle to execute on time. Overtime increases to complete all of the PMs, yet the performance of the operation does not improve. [Read more…]