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All actions performed in an attempt to retain an item in a specified condition by providing systematic inspection, detection, and prevention of incipient failures. Preventive maintenance provides a means to avoid unwanted downtime or equipment failures.
We are back with our 4th installment in the Opportunities for Maintenance and Operations series! We have discussed alarms, rework, and event rates. Today we talk about PM Routes. What can a PM Route do if our CMMS system has the ability to manage them? How does one take advantage? Watch the video and find out.
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For thousands of years, doctors treated virtually every skin ailment by ‘letting’ or draining the blood of the patient. Leeches are really good at doing this as they quite literally drink up the allegedly ‘poisoned’ blood that is being removed. Of course, by the late 1800s, science had advanced to the point where it was realized that this was nonsense, and so leeches fell out of favour in the world of medicine.
But that same scientific revolution saw the development of drugs like heroin and cocaine to cure everything from schizophrenia through to children’s cough. With doctors prescribing these drugs left right and centre, and worldwide epidemic of drug-addiction misery was spawned.
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In today’s competitive business environment, reliable equipment operation is crucial for uninterrupted operations and increased productivity. On the other hand, saving on maintenance costs can be a perilous path to tread.
Maintaining a balance between the two factors can have far-reaching effects, potentially even raising maintenance costs. The solution lies in optimizing equipment reliability, making it the bedrock of maintenance efforts.
It may be difficult to accelerate double-digit percentage cost reductions in some industries, such as pharmaceuticals and nuclear. Nonetheless, the primary focus should be on improving equipment reliability, which could lead to lower maintenance costs. [Read more…]
Any maintenance manager at a manufacturing plant or facility is likely aware of the problems caused by faulty equipment. Even if just one piece of equipment out of thousands breaks down, it could cause your entire operation to come to a halt. Preventive maintenance involves scheduling various maintenance activities to keep your equipment in peak condition and prevent breakdowns and failure. EAM/CMMS software is an essential tool for scheduling preventive maintenance and monitoring performance. The following are 5 tips to improve preventive maintenance with maintenance management software.
Want to achieve a worthwhile return-on-investment (ROI) from your software? Then it’s important to learn about some of the most commonly underused computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) functions. Many organizations do not use all of the features their preventive maintenance software provides, or don’t use the functions to their full capacity. In fact, a majority of plant maintenance managers feel they aren’t using their preventive maintenance software to its maximum capability.
Modern-day CMMS systems are crammed with various features, and users don’t necessarily need to access and master every feature of the system. However, it becomes a problem when users get so comfortable with their way of doing things that they avoid features they’re not familiar with. Especially if those features could potentially improve their productivity. Understanding what impact underutilized CMMS functions can have on your maintenance department will help you make the most of your software.
Performing a PM Optimization is not always as simple as it sounds. Often a Maintenance Planner will assemble a team of technicians to ask what is value-added and what is missing from a PM Routine. While these may be good questions to ask before diving into an analysis, or after an analysis, it does not base the answers on data. Basing the PM Routine on data, not intuition is critical to the long-term success of any organization.
To perform a PM Optimization, there are three main types of analysis to focus on the effectiveness of any PM Routine. The specific analysis used will depend on how mature (or effective) the current PM Routine is, and on the specific type of failures that the PM Routine is trying to address.
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.
Your facility asset and equipment are first and foremost a significant organizational investment. Performing routine maintenance on them is a key aspect of maintaining them in functioning order. Nothing will risk derailing production like an unexpected catastrophic failure of critical equipment – and one of the best ways to prevent that is to develop a robust routine maintenance strategy for your assets.
Over the last few decades, advancements in technology have dramatically changed the maintenance and reliability industry. Organizations have invested heavily in automation and technology to reduce staff overhead, improve product quality and increase safety. One thing that hasn’t changed much in the last few decades is preventive maintenance, or PM. PM is all about performing routine maintenance to improve equipment reliability, performance and cost-effectiveness. If applied correctly, PM has the capacity to transform an organization’s maintenance approach and lead to significant improvements in equipment reliability. However, there are many mistakes that can ruin an organization’s PM program.
The following are seven preventive maintenance mistakes to avoid: [Read more…]
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.
I recently had the pleasure to interview Doug Stangier, co-author of Preventive Maintenance Made Simple. This is another excellent book in the Made Simple series, published by ReliabilityWeb. During the interview, Doug not only provides insights into his book but also into what world class Preventive Maintenance looks like. Anyone new to maintenance and reliability, or seasoned experts can benefit from this great book. Without further delay, here is the interview with Doug.
In the previous articles, we looked at what type of analysis to use to evaluate the effectiveness of the PMs and if they are cost effective. Once the PMs have been optimized to ensure they are addressing the right failure modes, then they need to be made efficient. Below is an excerpt from a recent article in SMRP’s Solutions Magazine on how to make PM efficient using the lean tools.
Many organizations try to improve performance by just creating PM routines and letting the technicians loose to perform the work. This often has negative effects on plant performance. This has been proven through studies conducted by Ledet at numerous DuPont sites. 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%). Not quite the results to expect when implementing a strategy to improve plant performance. When the PM / PdM program is implemented with Planning & Scheduling, the plant saw an increase of 5.10%. Now that is an improvement.
But what about the remaining 11.40% of uptime? How does one address the remaining downtime?
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There are two instances when you should implement preventative action. First, once a failure occurs and you would like to avoid similar future failures. Second, before a failure occurs, yet an undesired failure mechanism is likely to occur.
Like corrective action there is a wide range of possible preventative actions. The selection of the right actions requires considering customer expectations, business and legal factors, along with the technical and economic feasibility. [Read more…]
