MRO Today - The secret to maximization

The secret to maximization

by Arne Oas

Companies cannot afford a letdown from their maintenance department.

Production interruptions and downtime cause havoc with just-in-time (JIT) scheduling. Most maintenance personnel understand this and, in an effort to provide production with the greatest throughput or uptime, implement maintenance management programs. But all too often, these computer programs become stagnant, fixed systems that do nothing but perpetuate current maintenance problems.

So, what do you do?

To improve your maintenance program, few investments pay off faster than new or revised preventive maintenance procedures and practices. How do you do this?

First, find out what repair information your system can track. Your system should have the ability to store repair history for a piece of equipment or a location, and your system should associate these with classes or types. You also need to track the number of repair or project incidents, the priority of the incident (at least routine or emergency), the work time, the downtime, the cause or reason, and the craft performing the work. If your system can't do this, look for a new one.

In the long term, including part information and identifying symptoms and remedial actions (what you saw and what you did to prevent it from happening again) will help you understand and correct equipment issues.

If your system can track that information, develop reports identifying repetitive failure items or weak components that cause problems on equipment or locations. With such reports, attack the specific units or items that create a problem for maintenance. Your other management duties probably don't permit you to spend much time analyzing this data. So, prioritize your equipment carefully and use analysis time wisely.

To help pick equipment and sort through your "bad and good actors," develop reports identifying the top 10 (or 20) pieces of problem equipment. Do this by number of breakdowns, downtime, repair hours and cost (remember the old 80/20 Pareto rule).

Tackle two or three items on the top 10 list and you'll start to have an impact. Most problems you address will be nickel and dime losses, but it's surprising how fast they add up.

Once you identify problems, look for the cause. Was the unit operated improperly or overloaded? Is there a new operator? If the unit was recently serviced or repaired, was it done correctly?

Look at the equipment. Is it the right specification for the application? Are failures due to specific parts? Can you reduce failures by installing heavy-duty components?

Look at the environment. Contamination, heat, moisture, vibration and corrosion contribute to shorter equipment life. If you have a severe environment, look again at equipment design.

Then, look at the preventive (PM) and predictive (PdM) maintenance given to the unit. Was the component serviced under the PM/PdM program? Was service performed when scheduled? Is the scheduling frequent enough? Were the right parts used? Was the job performed properly? Were personnel performing the work properly trained? Could new or different PM tools prevent future failure? Lastly, was sufficient time allowed to identify and carry out work?

Once you find the source, update your PM procedures to reduce the impact or prevent reoccurrence.

When you have control over the major "bad actors," perform the same type of analysis on equipment types or classes. The pain may not lie at the individual piece of equipment level. It may lie at the class level.

Are the belt conveyors more of a problem than the roller conveyors? Do the conveyors take more repair time than the ovens? The results can be surprising.

Clearly, there is nothing new or revolutionary about this, but for most maintenance organizations, the improvement potential is huge.

Plants often overlook this, but you can easily achieve performance improvements by going back to the very basics of maintenance.

The secret to getting the most out of your computerized maintenance management system lies in identifying and incorporating very basic operating and maintenance procedures.

Arne Oas is the practice area manager for Computerized Facility Integration. He can be reached at 205-918-2165.

This article appeared in the October/November 2000 issue of MRO Today magazine. Copyright 2000.