Components of an Effective Maintenance System

If you are ever in the fortunate position of developing a maintenance system from the beginning, the list below will help you focus your efforts. Maintenance systems in small business, develop by default and without much forethought. This list puts together, in one place, the important components of a workable maintenance system.

Key Requirements:

• Watch keeping by operators who monitor changes in equipment behaviour and raise a warning
• Daily work order system to capture times and history.
• Equipment history record keeping system.
• Parts purchasing system to capture costs by job and equipment.
• Job safety analysis (JSA) system to prevent accidents on- the-job.
• Regular equipment lubrication rounds list to insure greasing is done and oil levels are checked.
• Equipment operating, maintenance manuals and parts lists to understand how the machinery works.
• Critical spares lists and critical spares stock holding (or access to supplier) so parts are available quickly.
• Equipment maintenance history recording and trending system to justify buying new plant.
• Preventative and statutory maintenance system for routine time based inspections.

Supplementary requirements:

• Job planning systems to maximise work efficiency and get through the workload with minimum resources.
• Condition monitoring system to detect failure trends and stop breakdowns occurring.
• Subcontract resources negotiated to provide specialist labour, equipment and peak-load support.
• Incident and hazard reporting systems to manage and reduce exposure to risk and accidents.
• Plant modification approval system to carry out changes safely and do the up-front engineering.

The entire process of maintenance revolves around people and not machinery. If the people have no interest and skills in operating and maintaining their equipment well then you will always have high maintenance costs. In my opinion, if you want operators and maintainers to be keenly interested in the plant and equipment then they ought to have a component of their income directly linked to the profitable operation of the plant and equipment they use and maintain.

Mike Sondalini – Maintenance Engineer

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