Your Reliability Engineering Professional Development Site
Every CMMS provider likes to yell out how his CMMS "improves maintenance and reliability," as this is a catchy phrase that sounds relevant to their prospects. While there is inherently nothing wrong with that statement, you must agree that knowing "how" is where the real value lies. With that in mind, this series will try to cover many different ways in which CMMS, directly or indirectly, improves machine reliability.
We will talk about minimizing safety concerns, how to create procedures and make sure technicians follow them, taking advantage of features that allow you to manage preventive and predictive plans, how to take full use of asset history to improve diagnosing, how to monitor work on the go, manage multiple locations at once, cooperate with outside specialists and more.
While many of you might be familiar with many of the stated areas, I hope to approach problems from different angles so that even seasoned professionals can pick up some useful nuggets of information along the way.
Equipment maintenance is a requisite for companies that seek high-performance from their physical assets. If they can leverage a well-executed maintenance strategy, such organizations should gain the expected advantages that reliable assets will deliver such as reductions in operational costs and unplanned shutdowns.
In many manufacturing plants, managing equipment breakdowns and can seem like an overwhelming task. Machine failures occur without warning, production lines go down, managers and supervisors point fingers, and maintenance personnel continually chase parts and problems.
It’s often the case that these plants do not use a CMMS to gather data, plan preventative maintenance, or schedule repairs. This lack of planning contributes to a reactive maintenance environment where personnel is constantly trying to ‘keep up’ with production line problems.
As more and more organizations seek to improve their maintenance, many are shifting from the reactive ‘repair-focused’ maintenance models to more proactive ‘reliability-focused’ maintenance which includes things like tracking, identifying, and eliminating failure, maintenance planning and scheduling, reduced downtime, reduced costs, continuous improvement, and similar.