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Maintenance management needs to control and analyze the fundamental aspects of plant productivity, maintenance activities, logistics and finance, along side the use of management information, economics and processes.
This short paper explores some of the key issues of maintenance and the potential of knowledge base systems to help in the many decisions needed to develop good practices in maintenance management matters.
Your staff are the most important resource you have. Their skills, teamwork, effort and motivation are pre-requisite to success with progressive initiatives. Clear direction, goals and performance tracking is essential, as is feedback to induce a win-win environment.
Targeting and maximizing available resources to potential benefits are substantially aided by knowledge-based systems. The key is having the right data for analytical decisions. A good example is that of analyzing existing preventive and predictive programs to warn of potential failure conditions in order to circumvent total failure. Challenging the maintenance program foundations can confirm suitability of initiatives to direct and control resources to more applicable, feasible and worthwhile tasks.
The performance challenge ahead is to increase plant availability when demand is needed and concurrently reduce maintenance costs, whilst maintaining safety, environmental and life expectancy.
Plant availability, material costs and operational efficiency are the key elements of income generation. Attention is focused on availability and its relationship to maintenance as maintenance expenditure can represent up to 30 per cent of lifetime operating costs in many cases.
Maintenance plays a key role by restoring machine performance levels. This requires careful outage planning to coincide with minimum demand, if possible, whilst balancing available resources to direct and perform the work across the fleet of machines, in most cases within critical paths. Complications occur when unwanted forced outages or failures happen, which therefore also need to be catered for.
The following key aspects require major attention to improve availability
- Overhaul & repair turn around response
- Maintenance strategy, to reduce failure effects
- Work co-ordination, performance & quality
- Spares & materials sourcing and lead time
Plant life and life cycle costs are substantially dependent upon original design but may be influenced by the maintenance strategy and its execution over its lifetime. Well maintained plant with high availability at maturity are much more likely to be able to extend plant life. With suitable energy source economics, plant life extension and its associated maintenance investment, is a potential business option to explore.
Plant control, financial control, maintenance and logistical management each play vital and specific roles. For maximum effectiveness there is a demand for seamless integration to support a smart management system
Staff are the organizations prime resource that can innovate and maintain improved performance. Attention must be given to accommodate ideas and input from all staff to enhance a total productive approach. This requires "Change Management" support. Such initiatives are proven to be enhanced through a management system that allows effective communication between all staff. In brief, management systems supporting improved performance need to revolve around people and their job functions and fit the organization structure.
Systems need to be user friendly, highly intuitive, structured to minimize process data entry and contain the functionality that helps the user in their job role. They need to match desired processes, but must also be capable of change themselves to cater for the evolution of the business.
Maintenance departments are measured on their ability to respond and repair vital production equipment. Effectiveness requires extension beyond the physical repair-time; it needs to include the lead-time (time from report to work commencement), and return-time (time from work completion to equipment return to service). Lead-time can offer in many cases the best scope for performance improvement.
Predictive and preventive programs form the backbone of a well-organized maintenance department. Given that many items are either over or under maintained allows substantial scope for progressive improved performance. Safety must be given the highest priority of all failure consequences whether on operating equipment or during maintenance activities. Various techniques such as RCM are available to determine the consequence of failure and optimum maintenance programs. The list below categorizes the potential options of consequential failure events and maintenance options:
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Consequence of Failure
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Maintenance Approach
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- Safety
- Environmental
- Cost to Production
- Cost of Repair
And Hidden Failure & multiple failure for above consequences
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- On-Condition Monitoring
- Restoration
- Replacement
- Failure Finding
- Redesign
- Run to Failure
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Performance lies in the direction, skills and productivity of individuals that combine to make the team. The list below summarizes performance consideration topics:
- Organization, Direction & Resource
- Information & Knowledge
- Planning & Co-ordination
- Work Execution & Skills
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Spares and materials management plays a vital role in supporting work execution and ensuing plant availability. Its prime function is to respond to a requirement by either having the items in stock or providing fast acquisition routes.
Inventory management can be difficult, it has conflicting goals of keeping capital holdings low whilst making sure parts are available. Spares and material forecasting techniques can be applied to optimize levels, but as important, it requires partnerships with suppliers to acquire low lead-time spares.
Administration of stored items, information, costs, tenders, contracts, procurement, finance and audits demands streamlined systems to keep it under efficient control.
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