To support their daily operation, companies have all kinds of infrastructure and equipment. As the companies grow and become more technical, it becomes necessary to expand or acquire new infrastructure on such a scale that keeping them in optimal conditions, can be challenging, since there is a risk of affecting or even stopping the operation, if any equipment malfunctions or stops due to lack of maintenance. Is exactly for this reason that equipment maintenance becomes so important.
Maintenance of infrastructure and equipment in a company consists of carrying out control tasks to ensure their correct operation.
All these tasks can turn to be very complex, especially if they weren’t aticipate and opportunely since the appropriate measures are taken only when there is an operation delay, which often forces them to be done in a hurry to avoid affecting production activities.
There are various aintenance tasks and operations types:
Preventive
The most efficient according to experts and the most recommended. It consists of scheduling inspections, both for operation and safety, adjustments, repairs, analysis, cleaning, lubrication and calibration.
It is also known as Planned Preventive Maintenance (PPM). Its purpose is to anticipate failures while maintaining infrastructure systems, equipment and production facilities operating at optimal levels of efficiency. It’s characterized by the equipment inspection and the failures detection in their initial phase. In order to correct them opportunely and, to determine the causes of failures and the safe asset’s operation time. This helps to identify the weak spots of facilities and machines.
The main advantages it offers are:
- Avoids the most serious and costly breakdowns.
- Extends the useful life of machines and equipment.
- Improves the safety conditions of workers.
- Improves production levels.
It’s important to consider that elements with some damage, that company discards to buy new ones, preventive maintenance is worthless. Could be the case with coils, cables, straps and certain electronic devices such as boards.
Corrective
Unfortunately, the most used. Normally, due to lack or poor execution of preventive maintenance or because it’s not possible to ensure its 100% effectiveness. Consists of correcting failures or breakdowns at the moment they occur, the opposite to what happens in preventive maintenance’s case. For this reason, with this type of maintenance isn’t possible to obtain a reliable causes of failures’ diagnosis. Because it is not possible to determine if the failure was due to inappropriate handling or natural wear.
This maintenance’s type offers the opportunity to review and adjust failures, like those code related or security, performance and stability.
It also implies higher costs since the unidentified cause of the failure can induce new failures in the future, as well as collateral damage that can significantly reduce the useful life of the equipment and infrastructure. Companies can avoid difficulties with preventive maintenance. As well as must consider undesirable effects that may arise as a consequence of unplanned operations. They can represent significant losses of both money and clients if non-compliances occur due to it.
Additionally, both in preventive and corrective maintenance, the expenses such as the salary of the staff in charge, the cost of supplies and the cost of parts or elements to replace, must be kept in mind. Besides in the case of corrective maintenance, there must be an additional cost: stopping the production process in an unplanned manner during the time the infrastructure or equipment is out of service.
Predictive
Detection of failures before they arise, which gives enough time to correct them without harming the service or stopping the production process. Using diagnostic and monitoring instruments both periodically or continuously helps in duty, depending on the type of equipment or production system and offers the following advantages:
- Reduces paralysis times.
- Allows tracking of a defect over time.
- Optimizes the management of maintenance staff.
- Allows to have a record of the mechanical performance.
- Allows to know exactly the time limit prior to the appearance of an unexpected failure.
- It allows making decisions regarding the stopping of a system at critical moments.
- Facilitates failures analysis.
- Allows to carry out a statistical analysis of the system.
However, it also has disadvantages such as the high cost of the initial investment for equipment and analyzers that are generally specialized. It is also important to assign staff to perform the periodic reading of data and a technical team to interpret this data and draw the corresponding conclusions. This is also a job that requires great technical knowledge of the application.
Adaptative
The function of this type of maintenance is to adapt the work routine and the equipment to a new operating system, keeping in mind that it’s often necessary to change the one that the company has been using for a more current one.
Perfective
Mainly implemented by companies wich need to incorporate new software features, its main goal is to improve an application and make the system perform new tasks without setbacks.
For these reasons, it’s essential that companies deeply review their infrastructure and equipment to identify which of them deserves maintenance planning. Thus create a maintenance plan that clearly stipulates the fundamental tasks; its frequency; staff (internal or external) required; supplies and parts that to replace. It’s important to clearly define this information and in such a way that allows the operator to access to it quickly. It’s important to easily generate reports with errors or failures together with expenses of labor, supplies and parts.
Software
It is necessary to implement equipment maintenance software when paralysis in production causes losses and high costs. The objectives that this software must accomplish are:
- Optimize equipment availability.
- Optimize maintenance costs for equipment and machines, as well as human resources.
- Extend the useful life of the equipment.
- Avoid and minimize failures.
- Cushion the impact of failures that can’t be avoided.
- Avoid unnecessary stops.
- Prevent accidents.
- Guarantee the safety of the staff.
- Establish a balance between the cost of maintenance and the cost of lost profits.
How to manage
- Maintenance records.
- Stocks (control of spare parts and lists of materials).
- Maintenance costs.
- Labor.
- Suppliers.
- Areas of responsibility.
- The useful life cycle of company’s assets.
- Maintenance (follow – up of the warranty of the products).
Offering advantages such as
- Plan and monitor easily.
- Immediate access to information.
- Reduce operating costs.
- Reduce inactivity times.
- Facilitate maintenance tasks (predictive, preventive and corrective).
- Optimize the execution time of the different tasks.
- Manage the schedule of operators and technicians.
- Keep record and control of maintenance activities based on the conditions defined by the equipment inspection points.
- Schedule maintenance activities considering availability of equipment, materials and financial resources.
- Record and monitor the use of financial, human and material resources based on service orders.
- Automatically calculate the costs based on technician, equipment, activity, service order and period.
- Offer a failure analysis in a hierarchy format including presentation of failures, their causes and preventive or corrective actions.
- Perform maintenance activities through smartphones and other mobile devices.
There is also software that works with sensors that monitors a variety of signals from the machine in order to predict incipient failures and generate an alert to perform or schedule maintenance. Uploading sensor data to a cloud server allowing to view it in real time and also send it via email or text message.
Displaying and classifying data in a chart to identify problems and collect as much information about them as possible. It also generates red alerts so the team can repair certain failures immediately, as well as reports of possible causes (which saves time) and a log of new failures (which helps to identify patterns and trends).
Assistance software
Also known as TAS (acronym for Technical Assistance Service), is quite useful for managing work orders, that are the documents that a technician or operator needs to carry out a repair action and that serves as an instructions form. The TAS serves to coordinate the process of assigning, scheduling and programming these actions.
For its part, the EAM (acronym for Enterprise Assets Management) is the software wich organize and classify the information of the assets and their conditions and, by this, effectively identify future problems and direct the maintenance operations of infrastructure and equipment.
The tasks of a maintenance management software are
- Plan and manage projects for execution.
- Manage the maintenance record, as well as the tools and materials used.
- Determine the time between one failure and another, as well as the time spent on its repair.
These systems also consolidate information on assets from different areas, reducing general costs for operating and information technology (IT).
It must have the following functionalities:
Integrate with GIS (Geographical Information System): GIS provides data on the assets location and by integrating with EAM adds vital data, not only the location, but also the status, history and future maintenance requirements.
Work orders: work scheduling, staff assignment, receipt of materials and costs records.
Asset management: equipment and property data record including: specifications, warranty information, service contacts, spare parts, date of purchase and expectation of useful life.
Inventory control
Management of spare parts and other materials including their reservation.
Alarms or alerts
Notifications sent according to the schedules included in the maintenance plan with direct access to the pending tasks.
Labor and material forecasts
Allow to optimize the allocation of human resources for tasks and control the inventory of spare parts and consumables to buy them when they are needed.
Cost analysis
Reports on material costs, labor used and comparisons.
Statistical analysis
Generation of custom reports that can be used to anticipate possible failures or problems early enough to prevent them.
Integration
Allows the software to be integrated with other sources of information (websites, human resources portals, apps) and also to have mobile usability.
Information technology (IT)
The Information Technology (IT) area is essential in companies nowadays. The professionals in this area are in charge of implementing and managing the maintenance management software.
Goals
- Automate manual processes.
- Include platforms that allow optimizing time and money.
Software maintenance management indicators
Total availability
Obtained by dividing the number of hours that a piece of equipment is available to produce by the total number of hours in a specific period. It is important in factories and plants since in these cases the paralysis of equipment determines losses and delays in production.
Availability due to breakdowns
Excludes the calculation of availability in scheduled stoppages cases, since it applies only to unforeseen events.
MTBF (Mid Time Between Failure)
Determines the frequency with which equipment failures occur.
MTTR (Mid Time to Repair)
Determines the level of severity of a breakdown and establishes an average time it will take to repair.
Response time of the Maintenance Department: is determined by measuring the time that elapses between the moment the maintenance request is received until the moment the claim starts to be resolved.
Maintenance record
Companies need to have a maintenance record for audit purposes, and also to keep track and know when the next one will be. In that record must be the equipment that requires maintenance, the dates on which it was done and a description of the procedure. A technical datasheet must also be kept for each asset subject to maintenance, including detailed documentation.
Reports of each preventive maintenance should have: asset, maintenance description, person in charge, frequency, tasks to perform the maintenance, labor and materials. In the case of corrective maintenance, repairs made to the assets are also recorded and it’s required to fill a form that describes the task performed as well as the materials, inputs and labor involved.
Preventive Maintenance Alerts
A preventive maintenance alert is a list of overdue preventive maintenance records that companies can review through maintenance software. This alert notifies when a preventive maintenance work order is about to expire for an asset or location. Many software also offer the option of using an alarm to schedule corrective maintenance for a machine that must be running constantly. In this case, a scheduled shutdown alarm is set for the machine in order to perform maintenance tasks.
Generally, the systems offer the tasks needed in each maintenance in form of a check list so the person in charge indicates the tasks that were fulfilled and not fulfilled. A record of the costs must also be kept.
A correct planning allows to create an assets inventory which technical data and images can be associated. Here companies can schedule preventive and corrective maintenance alerts.
By scheduling predictive and preventive activities, companies will reduce emergency corrective maintenance over time, eliminating unplanned stops and unnecessary costs caused by these interruptions and, by providing more information, it will improve decision – making as long as an assets control dashboard is handled.
Warranty
The warranty promises the replacement or repair of any component of the equipment in case it fails during the warranty period. However, the same warranty stipulates that it is necessary to perform periodic maintenance on the equipment and its components to verify their correct operation.
By not performing these periodic maintenance, the warranty conditions would not be accomplished, which would imply the loss of it. For this reason, it is very important to make sure that a warranty includes the required maintenance.
It’s also advisable to ask about the validity of the warranty, the maintenance, what does it include and its periodicity.
Change or replacement of elements
The three stages of a component’s useful life are:
- Decreasing failure rate (early stage).
- Constant failure rate (useful stage).
- Increasing failure rate (wear stage).
Preventive replacement occurs during the third stage in order to reduce maintenance expenses and production losses. There is also the model of preventive replacement according to age, which industrial manufacturing uses a lot.
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