Why is maintenance essential for any business? the answer: to keep the machines working and ensure as minor damage as possible. Maintenance Efficiently is the key to protecting devices from breakdowns or getting stuck due to any fault. That’s why efficient maintenance operations with a sound strategy are essential in making processes cost-effective.
Maintenance Efficiency and Its Importance
Maintenance efficiency and its impact on production operations have a considerable role to play in businesses. What is efficient maintenance? Efficient maintenance is maintenance with the least possible resources that yields the best result in production.
In light of the above-mentioned definition, reliable maintenance refers to maintenance operations that utilize minimal resources while ensuring long-lasting and profitable outcomes.
Now, we will look for a maintenance strategy and the role reliability maintenance plays in the production process. For this, we aim to find what maintenance management strategy suits our business best and how we ensure it is as cost-effective as possible.
Maintenance Management Strategy
A maintenance management strategy is a management approach to maintenance operations for the most suitable and reliable results, keeping your resources handy and straightforward to access.
Maintenance management consists of the team you have for maintenance and the resources (tools, power, and time). Typically, this strategy has the least possible cost to the company with the best results.
Types of Maintenance Management Strategies
There are mainly two types of maintenance approaches used in production. One is the corrective maintenance strategy, and the second is the preventive maintenance strategy.
1. Corrective Maintenance
A corrective maintenance strategy comes into action when a problem arises. So, when this maintenance is ongoing, the production operation pauses and causes the company to lose production. This results in time waste, frequent machine disorders, and worker overtime charges. In this case, the whole maintenance team must be on standby at any time based on the requirement.
2. Preventive Maintenance
The preventive maintenance strategy adopts a system where it calibrates the maximum work limit of a machine or plant. Before the limit reach, it keeps the plant in working order and prevents any issues or problems from arising.
Since it is a systematic approach, every maintenance operation can be set beforehand. There is no need to take a break or keep the need to keep the whole maintenance team on standby.
A preventive maintenance strategy is more cost-effective for the company’s financial performance.
Now, we will take a further step to understand and implement efficient maintenance for balancing costs and reliability.
3. Elements of Efficient Maintenance
The efficiency of maintenance consists of several vital elements that need consideration, which we will discuss here.
4. Simplification of Maintenance Assets
We must simplify the maintenance system so the complexity does not cause any loopholes in the operations. This ensures maintenance assets’ availability, safety, and reliability.
Software like Microsoft Excel or a CMM method can quickly help you with this.
Every detail of a machine can be uploaded to your handy program, from its buying date to the number of times the maintenance has been done. This even includes the dates with issues and problems found with them to keep track and record of overall performance.
5. Adopting a Preventive Maintenance Strategy
The preventive maintenance approach simplifies, reduces costs, and is reliable. However, it ensures that your maintenance team is safe and ready.
Since a preventive maintenance strategy schedules maintenance beforehand. So, the maintenance team doesn’t have to rush in a hurry, prior arrangements can be made.
This approach reduces costs and enhances reliability since maintenance targets are set in advance, preventing sudden disruptions to other operations.
6. Analyzing and Managing the Maintenance Activity
The preventive maintenance approach simplifies activity analysis, facilitating preparation and planning for future maintenance programs. This also helps manage the maintenance activity by taking previous actions into account.
Goals of Efficient Maintenance
After carefully adopting all elements of efficient maintenance and checking these, we set our goals to keep an eye on the various criteria required to achieve them.
1. Cost Reduction
When we set our elements and act according to the plan, efficient maintenance must be a cost-reducing operation because of prior planning, improved decision-making, a detailed view of all information, better control, and monitoring.
2. Risk Reduction
This approach also puts the risk at a minimum level because of detailed and simplified information, communication, and compliance with the guidelines set for timely and efficient maintenance.
3. Reliability
Efficient maintenance is a reliable process as all factors and information are prior set to discuss per the analyzed data and management.
4. Improvement
Efficient maintenance is based on continuous improvement, building on the analysis of previous operations to enhance each subsequent process. It’s required that the process is improved with every iteration so all results show progress and add value.
5. Better Team Management
Data regarding every machine or detailed information about every task to be done with them makes. It is possible to allocate a maintenance team only when required. This helps improve team management which also results in cost reduction.
Conclusion
Efficient maintenance helps balance the cost and reliability of operations in a production plant. With the constant changes in the market and producers’ evolving needs and resource utilization, efficient maintenance is now necessary more than ever. As challenges arise, efficient care ensures our processes remain efficient and cost-effective. Allowing us to keep pace with the rapidly changing era.