Refining Asset Maintenance and Reliability at Your Facilities
Maintenance managers understand how difficult it is to ensure equipment maintenance at their facilities effectively. Some of the obstacles that maintenance teams confront are work order backlogs, emergency maintenance requests, budgetary concerns, mismanagement, lots of paperwork, clunky CMMS systems, and a lack of proper preventative maintenance. While these difficulties may be daunting, maintenance managers can effectively address them if specific solutions are implemented. Let’s look at some methods that will help the maintenance team improve equipment maintenance and reliability.
Steps that streamline equipment maintenance and reliability
Record and organize even the most minor maintenance tasks
Maintenance crews have a lot on their plates because no one knows when a piece of machinery will break down, and they do without warning! Maintenance technicians must respond to emergency work orders, perform routine maintenance, lube equipment, etc. Unfortunately, not all jobs are well documented; many people assume that the team should only document “important” work. The maintenance manager may continue to allocate jobs to a technician while the latter is preoccupied with undocumented tasks — an obvious symptom of mismanagement.
Maintenance managers must plan, organize, monitor, prioritize, and record even the smallest jobs to improve equipment maintenance and reliability. Using a CMMS solution to create work orders for all maintenance tasks is the correct approach to the problem. Work orders ensure accurate record-keeping and assist in tracking which technician is working on which machine, maintaining good management, and understanding the workload on individual personnel. Furthermore, these work orders will contain useful information that can be used later on when performing maintenance on specific equipment.
Analyze the site(s) and identify the most prominent issues for better maintenance and reliability
While this step will necessitate both effort and time, it has the potential to improve maintenance and reliability greatly. Maintenance managers must assess the site(s) they are in charge of with the assistance of key personnel and identify any deficiencies that may impede maintenance activities.
To begin, maintenance managers can gather data from both machine operators and maintenance technicians. While CMMS solutions such as CloudApper CMMS already have all of the information (work order history, comments, etc.) available within the app and photographs or videos provided by authorized personnel, this stage necessitates a more personalized approach. The maintenance manager must personally visit and examine the locations with the assistance of the maintenance team.
Following that, the manager must assess all of the data, connect the dots, and determine the most serious difficulties and dangers of impending maintenance tasks and whether other maintenance aspects may be improved. The maintenance manager should disclose these results to management to improve future maintenance efforts and asset reliability.
Conduct a thorough asset condition assessment
We understand that conducting ACA (asset condition assessment) might be time-consuming, but it gives essential information about the assets’ problems. If you’ve already done it, it can be done in-house. Alternatively, hiring a contractor is a more practical option.
ACAs aid in the capture of ALL assets within the organization, which is critical for streamlining maintenance and reliability within plants. On the other hand, responsible maintenance managers go far further: they categorize, catalog, and appraise the various assets’ conditions. For example, grading the machinery depending on its condition (1 meaning good and 5 representing terrible) might assist in promptly identifying problematic assets.
Capturing all asset information can also help identify which ones need to be replaced in the future — most of which will no longer require preventive maintenance. As a result, technicians allocated to near obsolete equipment can be assigned to other, more urgent service orders, allowing for more efficient resource allocation.
Read the full article at Refining Asset Maintenance and Reliability at Your Facilities.
