Critical Elements for Maintenance Plan Success
Maintenance planning and scheduling are some of the least understood tasks that modern assets management, which is the core of an efficient maintenance control system. With the help of a computerized maintenance management system, and work orders, maintenance planning involves the weekly or daily scheduling, planning, and monitoring activities to ensure that the work scheduled is carried out and resources are being utilized effectively. However, many companies have a difficult time making their maintenance plans and scheduling as efficient as they should be.
Many asset-intensive organizations understand the importance of efficient and effective maintenance scheduling. Planning is one of the critical procedures that help ensure the reliability of equipment and aid inefficiency. But studies reveal that many businesses can still not implement maintenance planning in a timely manner, which has an adverse impact on productivity, work efficiency and wrench times downtime, equipment uptime, reliability, and costs. In the long term, the unplanned or unscheduled downtime and stock-outs at the maintenance store take away the company’s capacities and profit.
Both the facility manager and maintenance planner’s responsibilities also play a significant role in ensuring the maintenance plan’s success. They ensure that the maintenance technicians have the essential tools to complete their tasks on time.
A properly planned and scheduled maintenance schedule increases your “wrench-on” time. Wrench-on time refers to the day’s duration when maintenance workers are engaged in hands-on maintenance. Technicians on idle time are wasting money on human capital and must be cut down to ensure a smooth operation.
Critical Elements for Maintenance Program Success
Prioritizing
Maintenance departments face a variety of challenges to achieve excellence. The first step to establishing the foundation for a successful maintenance plan is to identify and prioritize the essential areas that require attention. A lot of maintenance challenges are prevalent across all businesses and industries. These problems significantly impact the performance of maintenance and overall business performance. More than 50 billion dollars are lost each year in manufacturing due to unplanned downtime. A company’s priorities define the goals of its maintenance programs and the subsequent strategy.
There are a variety of levels of complexity in their maintenance programs and are at various stages on the development curve. Certain organizations operate in an essentially reactive mode and are not able to implement effective preventative maintenance (PM) programs in the place.
Other companies have already implemented PM initiatives and recognized the benefits of switching from proactive to reactive maintenance. This gap among businesses concerning proactive maintenance might be vast, yet both can increase their efficiency in maintenance. Even tiny incremental improvements in these crucial components can significantly impact business.
Management of Work Orders
The foundation of the majority of maintenance programs is the work order system. Its purpose is to manage maintenance operations starting with the request through execution, completion, and record keeping.
Various factors influence the method a business employs to manage work orders, like the size of operations, the number of technicians, and so on. Therefore, there are three major strategies we have seen in the current business world:
- Paper-based systems
- Spreadsheets
- Asset Information System or Enterprise Asset Management System
The third method is crucial since all maintenance tasks require a work order. Effective work order management techniques improve maintenance efficiency and provide the most outstanding value to your organization.
The essential components of managing work orders can be described as follows. The first step is the maintenance request, in which the work order is assigned as well as work scheduled. Following that, the maintenance task is completed, then documented and completed.
Empowering in Technology
Maintenance-related technologies will help businesses achieve and surpass their goals for maintenance performance. They offer considerable advantages like a boost in the performance of their plants, reducing the time it takes to shut down, reducing operating expenses, and enhancement in asset information.
Managers and DMU’s often wonder what the benefit of buying these software systems is? The biggest benefit is a significant ROI when it is implemented correctly. Another benefit is that the client develops assets and a maintenance management history as time passes.
The data from the history could be utilized to detect patterns, identify benchmarks, schedule preventive maintenance, and accelerate the repair process. Furthermore, it offers additional benefits, such as prolonging the equipment lifespan, decreasing downtime, and increasing the efficiency of planning and scheduling.
The adoption of new technologies can provide employees with more accurate and historical information about maintenance and asset management that improves productivity, decision-making, and overall maintenance performance.
Information on Maintenance and Asset Information
Accurate and reliable data is crucial to improving their performance and making sound business decisions. One of the primary hurdles organizations face to develop a better maintenance program is collecting the relevant maintenance data. If organizations plan to start this process, they must decide what maintenance and asset details are essential. History of equipment and assets will provide helpful information in the repair and maintenance process.
Information on the prior work orders pertaining to the equipment can help identify the issue before the maintenance work begins. Details like a parts listing and reference drawings and documentation are valuable in maintaining. The next step would be creating an archive of maintenance information.
Once all the data has been taken into account, it is crucial to ensure that it is accessible to those who require it. Most of the time, there are many different users, including an offsite manager to field technicians.
The transformation enhances the value of information into intelligence. This is accomplished by analyzing the data for patterns to anticipate issues, for example, unexpected downtime.
Transitioning from Reactive to Proactive Maintenance
The final component of an effective maintenance program is switching from proactive to reactive maintenance. Reactive maintenance is best described as a “fix it when it breaks” maintenance method. Companies that respond to the issue that arises instead of reacting before the problem are prone to a large amount of downtime that is not planned for longer equipment life spans and more expensive maintenance expenses.
Many organizations are looking to develop a proactive maintenance program; it could be difficult. Various factors can help in the shift from proactive to reactive. In the beginning, it’s impossible to do it until a business has begun gathering asset and maintenance intelligence. This is why CMMS systems are crucial for maintaining efficiency. They are among the most affordable and efficient methods of gathering maintenance information.
Unplanned downtime can’t be eliminated; however, moving to a proactive method that allows companies to anticipate and take action to issues before they arise will reduce downtime that is not planned improve efficiency in scheduling of labor, increase equipment reliability and reduce maintenance costs.
Share
