Key takeaways
- Run root cause analysis after every significant breakdown so corrective and preventive actions stop it from recurring.
- Review the preventive maintenance program after each failure so tasks and timing stay effective.
- Use condition monitoring for first symptoms, and predictive maintenance to trend equipment against its own history and its peers.
- Plan PM execution on a workbench so date and resource changes never break the underlying schedule.
- Apply lessons to equipment of the same class and track downtime cost, maintenance cost and KPIs.
A successful maintenance strategy rests on seven practices: root cause analysis after major breakdowns, a preventive maintenance program reviewed against failures, condition monitoring, predictive maintenance, a planning workbench for PM execution, horizontal deployment of lessons to similar equipment, and metrics for downtime and cost. Together they raise availability and cut maintenance cost.
What makes a maintenance strategy successful?
Maintenance organizations are continually under pressure to deliver high availability of critical equipment, supporting non-stop production amidst decreasing maintenance budgets, increasing equipment complexity, and reduced manpower. Maintenance teams have to be efficient and effective at the same time.
Here are the seven best practices that are integral to any successful maintenance strategy. This will increase availability, reliability, and performance resulting in increasing asset life, minimizing downtime and reducing the cost of maintenance.
1. Why perform root cause analysis after a major breakdown?
While run to failure is not a preferred approach for maintenance, failures do happen and break fixes to restore business operations add a lot of stress on the resources. It’s a relief when the equipment is put back to work but a critical aspect begins therein.
Root cause analysis is a systematic problem-solving technique to identify the origin of the problem. A well-done root cause analysis can not only identify the root cause but can also determine other contributing factors including events and conditions that led to the failure. Corrective and preventive actions can be instituted to avoid recurrence.
2. How do you keep the preventive maintenance program effective?
Most organizations have preventive maintenance programs in place. The common problem is that the programs are not kept up to date. Each breakdown is an opportunity to assess the content, effectiveness, and timeliness of the preventive maintenance programs in place. Periodic reviews of the preventive maintenance programs, to adapt to changing operating conditions and apply the learnings can help them stay current and increase their effectiveness.
3. How does condition monitoring catch first symptoms?
Monitoring the critical parameters of equipment and the operating environment can bring up the latent conditions that can develop into failure phenomena. Most modern CMMS software can integrate with equipment monitoring systems, Sensors, SCADA, the Internet of Things and other automated mechanisms to capture and analyze condition parameters. An effective condition monitoring system can track the variations better and warn of imminent breakdowns. Defining alerts and notifications to capture first symptoms can give enough time to schedule corrective actions and thus avoid costly breakdowns.
4. What does predictive maintenance add to condition monitoring?
Multiple data points are captured continuously relating to the equipment condition and operating environment. While condition monitoring compares equipment performance against standards or set parameters, predictive maintenance makes it one level up – by comparing the equipment performance over time (trend analysis) and against the performance of peer equipment to identify potential failures and institute preventive actions. Multi-factor analysis and sophisticated modelling techniques are employed for high critical equipment to predict the risk of failure.
5. How does a planning workbench improve PM execution?
The Preventive Maintenance compliance index computes the percentage of preventive maintenance orders that have been completed on time. Poor compliance often arises when the long-range planning goals do not match with the short-term on-ground realities. Effective execution requires bridging the gaps by making suitable adjustments to accommodate production schedules of equipment, resource constraints, spares and tools availability etc. Planning a workbench can serve as a utility to adjust the forthcoming preventive maintenance instance without impacting the underlying schedules. Minor adjustments of dates and swapping of equipment, tools or resources can be achieved without impacting the larger goals or integrity of preventive maintenance programs.
6. What is horizontal deployment of maintenance learning?
Production lines often include multiple types of equipment that belong to the same class. Organizations with multiple production facilities may have a substantial mix of similar equipment classes across locations. Learning arising out of failures (root cause analysis), corrective actions, preventive actions and other insights from condition monitoring and predictive maintenance can be applied to all the equipment belonging to the same class, thereby avoiding the recurrence of the failure phenomena. Sharing feedback and learning on equipment condition, performance and maintenance across the enterprise can overall improve the collective performance and institutionalize the learning. A structured horizontal deployment program can amplify the preventive maintenance benefits manifold.
7. Which metrics show whether the strategy works?
“If you can measure it, you can manage it” is an old business adage that applies to maintenance as well. A clearly defined maintenance system will have the means to measure the cost of downtime, cost of maintenance and repair. Set goals and track performance against them to build an objective system that can help identify, prioritize, execute, monitor and improve the operational processes and equipment performance.
Quantifying the key performance indicators can help to uncover hidden inefficiencies to improve throughput. Pair each practice with one measure:
| Practice | Metric to track |
|---|---|
| Root cause analysis | Repeat failures, corrective actions closed |
| Preventive maintenance review | PM compliance, breakdowns on PM-covered assets |
| Condition monitoring | Alerts raised and acted on before failure |
| Predictive maintenance | Failures caught early versus unplanned failures |
| Planning workbench | PM compliance index (orders completed on time) |
| Horizontal deployment | Recurrence of a failure across same-class equipment |
| Metrics | Downtime cost, maintenance cost, MTBF, MTTR |
How do the seven practices work together?
Best practices outlined above are not stand alone; more often than not they work in tandem, feeding each other and thus building an integrated and efficient maintenance strategy for the enterprise. Such an Integrated Maintenance Strategy can help the organization in improving the return on investments, identify opportunities for improvement, balance the workloads and thus improve resource productivity and reduce overall costs.
How do you choose the right approach for each asset?
No single tactic fits every asset. Match the approach to the failure pattern and the consequence of failure:
- Low-consequence assets: run to failure can be the right, lowest-cost choice.
- Wear tied to age or use: time-based or usage-based preventive maintenance.
- Critical assets whose failures give a warning period: condition monitoring and predictive maintenance.
A CMMS keeps the asset criticality, task history and readings together, so the choice for each asset can be reviewed after every failure.
FAQs
What are the key elements of a successful maintenance strategy?
Root cause analysis, an up-to-date preventive maintenance program, condition monitoring, predictive maintenance, a planning workbench for PM execution, horizontal deployment of lessons and clear metrics. They work as one loop, each feeding the next.
What is the difference between condition monitoring and predictive maintenance?
Condition monitoring compares readings against set limits and alerts on first symptoms. Predictive maintenance goes further by trending performance over time and against peer equipment to estimate failure risk before limits are breached.
What is horizontal deployment in maintenance?
Horizontal deployment applies what one failure taught, such as the root cause and corrective action, to every machine of the same class across lines and plants, so the same failure does not repeat elsewhere.
How often should a preventive maintenance program be reviewed?
Review it after each breakdown and on a regular cycle, for example yearly, checking task content, frequency and timing against operating conditions and failure history. Remove tasks that do not prevent a failure mode.
Which KPIs measure a maintenance strategy?
Track PM compliance, unplanned downtime, mean time between failures, mean time to repair, repeat failures and the cost of downtime and maintenance. Set goals for each and review progress against them.
