Mastering the Art of Maintenance Planning: Best Practices for Success
Keeping your assets operating at their best is crucial, whether you have a few or more of them. It is detrimental to the bottom line for business operations to cease entirely due to equipment failure.
Make your maintenance staff more effective in handling equipment maintenance and preventing unexpected emergencies by improving preventative maintenance planning and scheduling routine tasks.
Contents
- 1 6 Maintenance Planning Fundamentals
- 1.1 What Is Industrial Maintenance?
- 1.2 What Is Preventive Maintenance?
- 1.3 What Is Maintenance Management?
- 1.4 What Is Equipment Maintenance?
- 1.5 What Is Plant Maintenance?
- 1.6 Maintenance Planning and Scheduling
- 1.7 What Is Equipment Reliability?
- 1.8 Ways to Improve ERM
- 1.9 What Is Reliability Assessment?
- 1.10 Summary
6 Maintenance Planning Fundamentals
A maintenance planner job description includes keeping the company’s equipment operating more efficiently. There are six fundamental components of how they should be used correctly. This results in sharing of crucial asset-related data and information throughout the plant and even between different plants. Here are 6 maintenance planning fundamentals that you can apply to your maintenance strategy:
Remain Stand-Alone Individual
Planners must be kept apart from the maintenance team, so they can concentrate on upcoming projects. If not, it is simple to enlist planners as supplementary technicians on last-minute projects for ongoing tasks in maintenance planning.
Maintain a Future Focus
Work on tasks that are anticipated to be done in two weeks from the scheduled day. This should be done by planners. The maintenance managers should receive their plans for the subsequent week’s schedule as soon as they finish.
Create Mini-Files
Planners should keep their information organized by using a mini-file or component level when constructing individual paper for work plans. With the use of this organizational structure, planners can gather helpful information over time, considering the maintenance team’s feedback for use the next time an issue arises.
Estimate Time Reasonably
Planners must possess 10 to 15 years of expertise to be relied upon by firms to produce accurate time estimates for assignments. For instance, the planner should use this estimate if an entry-level technician takes 10 hours to accomplish a work, but the experienced team member can complete the same activity in half that time.
Tailor Plans to Skill Levels
A predetermined number of technicians’ plans should be the responsibility of the planners. To establish the scope of work and the strategy to match those skill levels, planners need to understand these technicians and their skill levels.
Take Work Samples
Planners can gauge how much more productive technicians are by measuring their wrench time. Technicians typically encounter fewer delays during and between jobs when the work is planned.
What Is Industrial Maintenance?
Implementing procedures to lower breakdowns, boost uptime, and advance general reliability is known as industrial maintenance, commonly called plant maintenance. In other words, maintenance refers to activities that keep assets in excellent operating order.
Production processes are maintained when the company’s equipment continues to operate at its predicted capacity. A maintenance plan reduces maintenance costs, increases possible uptime, and eventually increases profitability.
- Have a comprehensive maintenance schedule to identify activities that should be completed to avoid breakdowns altogether, saving your company money.
What Is Preventive Maintenance?
Preventive maintenance, also known as preventative care, is performed on physical assets regularly to reduce the probability of equipment failure and unscheduled machine downtime.This can be costly for maintenance crews and facility managers.
- Effective preventative maintenance is planned and scheduled, utilizing tools like a CMMS and real-time data insights.
- Carry out a preventative maintenance to avoid unplanned breakdowns while the equipment is in use.
A preventive maintenance method is widely used between reactive and predictive maintenance (sometimes called “run-to-failure”).
What Is Maintenance Management?
Maintaining a company’s assets and resources while keeping costs and time under control and ensuring optimal manufacturing process efficiency is the definition of maintenance management. A computerized maintenance management system (CMMS), has replaced the outdated, time-consuming, handwritten maintenance management method with software that plans, tracks, measures, and optimizes all aspects of a maintenance program in a single central system.
What Is Equipment Maintenance?
Equipment maintenance is any procedure to keep a company’s equipment in reliable working order. It could include both preventative and corrective maintenance.
Tools, big off-road vehicles, mechanical components, and computer systems are all examples of equipment. For instance, repairs to automated food processing equipment will differ from those to large construction equipment.
- There are different types of equipment maintenance staff, which include technicians, supervisors, and managers.
- Industries like food processing, plastic manufacturing, steel mills, restaurants, construction, and automobile need maintenance on their equipment.
What Is Plant Maintenance?
Plant maintenance is the service and repair of assets and equipment. During regular operation, assets may accumulate wear and tear that must be addressed.
- Plant maintenance includes scheduled and unscheduled maintenance. This may be designed according to equipment age or usage.
- An unscheduled maintenance can occur after equipment failure or operation excursions.
This can cause downtime due to process disruption and critical assets being taken offline for servicing. During plant maintenance, input supply chains may lose efficiency as assets cannot process at their standard rate.
Maintenance Planning and Scheduling
When done correctly, proper maintenance and scheduling can dramatically boost productivity. The implementation of maintenance planning, scheduling, and more are covered here.
Breaking Down Maintenance Planning and Scheduling
In the modern manufacturing world, businesses aim for increased productivity that results in high-quality products at the lowest cost to stay ahead of the competition. When combined, the maintenance planning and scheduling tasks make up a maintenance program.
Maintenance Planning
This is a procedure that anticipates possible problems and finds solutions for them in development.
- This includes recognizing the components and tools required for jobs, ensuring they are available, and placing them in the appropriate places.
- It also includes having a planner write instructions on accomplishing a project before work is allocated and determining and gathering the necessary components and/or tools.
Planning for maintenance also entails duties linked to the following elements:
- Handling reserve parts
- Ordering nonstock parts
- Staging parts
- Illustrating parts
- Managing breakdowns and vendor lists
- Quality assurance (QA) and quality control (QC)
Maintenance Schedule
It specifies when and who is responsible for completing the scheduled work. It contains information on “when” and “who.” Scheduling is used for the following purposes:
- Planning the most work you can with the resources you have.
- Organizong your schedule based on the highest-priority work orders
- When necessary, scheduling as many preventative maintenance tasks as possible.
- Reducing the need for contracts and outside assistance by utilizing internal workers well.
When combined, maintenance planning and scheduling ought to significantly improve various aspects of your company. These may consist of:
- controlling resources related to maintenance can aid in budgeting
- decreased equipment downtime
- a decrease in replacement parts
- enhanced productivity
- heightened effectiveness through less resource mobility between locations
What Is Equipment Reliability?
The risk of equipment and process failures is addressed by equipment reliability, which focuses on the equipment’s availability, suitability, and cost. Throughout an item’s useful life and mission, its value can be realized thanks to reliability strategies and tactics.
- Reliability and maintenance methods are devised to lessen the likelihood and consequences of equipment failure.
Reliability can be seen as a set of management strategies to anticipate unreliability (instability) and value the proactive eradication of problems.
- Reliable procedures are more likely to be achieved with reliable equipment, which increases the availability of vital treatments for patients worldwide; the importance of equipment reliability and maintenance (ERM).
- Cost, quality, and production lead time are the three critical components of competitiveness, and equipment reliability and maintenance (ERM) are strongly related to these three factors.
Effective machinery produces consistently higher-quality goods because it operates more efficiently. By boosting uptime, lowering the requirement for spare parts, and reducing the need for retooling, ERM also lowers production costs.
Ways to Improve ERM
- Use Data to Drive Business Decisions
- Work with Precision
- Accurately Record Maintenance History
- Understand Your Employee’s Limitations
- Work closely with Maintenance Technicians
What Is Reliability Assessment?
Reliability assessment is an important aspect of maintenance planning, as it allows for the identification of possible failure modes and the development of active preventive maintenance strategies.
When leading reliability assessments, maintenance planners typically consider various factors such as the age and condition of equipment, past performance history, operating environment, and maintenance and repair histories.
- Analyze data, so planners can comprehensively understand the equipment’s reliability and identify potential issues before they become significant problems.
- Reliability assessment can also help to optimize maintenance scheduling by identifying critical equipment and prioritizing maintenance activities accordingly.
In addition to improving overall equipment efficacy, this can help to decrease downtime and extend equipment life. Reliability assessment is a vital part of good maintenance planning because it lets you make targeted and effective repair plans that help make sure equipment works safely and reliably over time.
Summary
Maintenance planning is crucial to the success of preventive maintenance programs. By utilizing the six fundamental components of maintenance planning and understanding the importance of industrial maintenance, preventative maintenance, maintenance management, equipment maintenance, and plant maintenance, maintenance planners can effectively manage maintenance activities to ensure the continued safe and reliable operation of equipment.
Proper maintenance planning and scheduling can dramatically increase productivity and reduce downtime, ultimately leading to increased profitability. Companies can reduce costs, boost uptime, and advance general reliability by improving equipment reliability and maintenance. Additionally, reliability assessment is a critical aspect of maintenance planning, allowing for identifying potential issues before they become significant problems.
By following best practices for maintenance planning and incorporating these essential elements, maintenance planners can master the art of maintenance planning and succeed.