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Optimizing the maintenance cost.

Publicado el 12 de junio de 2016.

Pankaj Singh CMRP.

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.

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