In the modern competitive market organizations have the market
pressure to be low cost producers. Maintenance has a greater scope to achieve the lower cost by helping to minimize the maintenance cost at the same time increase the up-time, reducing the production losses.
Step -1
Organizations who are fighting with the emergency failures and
have more of reactive maintenance culture it is very important to install a preventive maintenance process as a base to start the improvement program.
The preventive maintenance activities should not be chosen
arbitrary but it should be based on statistics and FMEA (failure mode and effect analysis).
Step-2
Once the preventive maintenance is installed the next step is
choose the right frequency for performing preventive maintenance. It has been observed that increasing preventive maintenance has also increased reactive maintenance. So preventive maintenance should always be supported by predictive maintenance. The right kind of predictive maintenance for each equipment and its frequency has to be chosen and applied. A balance to be achieved between preventive and predictive maintenance, how predictive maintenance need to emphasized over preventive maintenance as far as possible.
Predictive maintenance gives the alarm of upcoming failures
weeks in advance, which gives a time to plan for the job, spares, tools and shutdown in optimal way to minimize its cost.
Step-3
Once the preventive and predictive maintenance has been
achieved it would give enough control over the failures and better understanding of mechanism of failure. Each failure must to go through a root cause failure analysis and need to eliminate the root cause. As the knowledge will grow about failures it will appear that most of the failures can be eliminated changing the design or life can be increased.
Step -4
Here it will appear that reliability is not only in complete control
of maintenance but proper design, commissioning and start-up are integral part of achieving the higher reliability. Procurement and suppliers also has a major role to play in achieving the reliable plant operations. The procurement should purchase the equipment based on life cycle cost and not only on the present pricing comparison.
The idea of proactive maintenance is minimize the need for
maintenance . Step-5
Training and skill development are essential for achieving the
reliability. It has been observed that up 60% failures are introduced by manual intervention by operations or maintenance. Training and standard procedure help in minimizing such event.
Along with above steps a dedicated planner and inventory
management and right kind of CMMS are integral part of improving the maintenance function and in turn improving the operating cost as w whole.
The Preventive and predictive maintenance should be viewed as a
tool and not as a solution to achieve proactive culture. And finally should be a strategic domain including all concerned departments as below steps.