Maintenance management is the practice of organizing maintenance work to maximize its efficiency, helping businesses reduce indirect costs such as delayed shipments, lost revenues and quality assurance issues.
An essential element of effective maintenance management is being able to track and interpret data effectively, something CMMS systems make easier than ever.
Preventive maintenance
Preventive maintenance enables facility managers to detect and address potential problems before they become major interruptions to production. Preventive maintenance helps reduce downtime costs by mitigating system breakdown effects and cutting spare parts inventory needs; in addition, this maintenance method prolongs equipment lifespans while decreasing fire or safety incidents.
Preventive maintenance requires careful planning and execution. An effective program should take into account factors like failure data, industry expertise, repair histories and usage patterns of each piece of equipment to ascertain when and how often preventive maintenance must take place. This information can help determine the frequency and type of preventive maintenance services necessary.
Preventive maintenance plans typically consist of tasks such as cleaning, lubrication and replacing or repairing parts; it will also include scheduled inspections as well as partial or complete overhaul of an asset. An organized preventive maintenance program can be complex to organize with regards to multiple assets; its scheduling can also prove tricky; any delays even by one day could incur large costs.
An effective way to stay on schedule with maintenance tasks is using a dedicated maintenance software program. This eliminates the need for paper schedules or remembering what needs to be done manually; automating tasks saves time and ensures consistency; while also helping identify recurring issues and prioritize them.
Reliability-centered maintenance
Reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) seeks to achieve optimal levels of performance and reliability at minimum costs, through careful examination of system failure modes and selecting suitable maintenance tasks. RCM employs preventive and predictive maintenance techniques such as calendar or usage-based maintenance or condition monitoring in order to reduce risks of failure; this approach differs from run-to-failure maintenance that attempts to solve problems after they arise.
An effective RCM program will prevent unnecessary maintenance while making any undertaken effective and appropriate. This will minimize production losses caused by critical equipment as well as prevent leaks that might harm the environment or pose health hazards to employees.
To do this effectively, it’s essential that you first understand the purpose and functionality of your equipment before evaluating how and where it could fail and its potential repercussions. Next, identify maintenance tasks which mitigate each potential failure mode as well as determine their frequency and priority levels.
RCM is an in-depth methodology that requires careful thought and implementation. Successful RCM programs will reduce failure notifications and alerts while helping your employees gain a deeper understanding of the maintenance tasks they perform, ultimately creating more cost effective and productive maintenance programs than traditional firefighting maintenance techniques.
Work order management
Work order management is a method of tracking and documenting maintenance tasks at your facility. It begins when staff identify that an asset requires maintenance, filling out a work request form with details regarding location, issue or maintenance required and any images or videos related to the incident that need to be included with it before it can be processed and approved – then technicians can begin the necessary maintenance procedures.
Use of work order software simplifies and streamlines the work request tracking process, automating every aspect of it from information capture through notification of technicians of required parts or equipment, logging completed maintenance and streamlining documentation required for compliance audits.
As soon as a user submits a work request, its maintenance manager evaluates it based on urgency, backlogs and team availability. This step is particularly critical if users do not explicitly state what level of priority the work warrants – for instance a fused light bulb may not require immediate attention while broken conveyor belt may necessitate immediate action from your workforce. It is therefore essential that work orders be prioritized based on impact to the business. You could use data collected through work order management systems to detect trends in equipment failure and create proactive maintenance plans that reduce downtime by taking proactive measures proactively managing failures before they occur.
Asset management
Assets are among the most precious resources of a business, whether equipment, buildings or vehicles. To extract maximum value from these resources and increase profitability for shareholders and stakeholders alike, businesses must engage in effective asset management. This involves identification, location, condition assessment and specification specification maintenance procedures as part of an overall program that ensures maximum return from assets owned by an organization.
To effectively manage an asset, its identification and documentation are both essential steps. A centralised system collecting data from various sources may assist in doing this effectively; using this data to formulate a maintenance plan to keep assets running at peak capacity – cutting operational costs while decreasing downtime costs.
An organization must always know where its assets are at all times, particularly mobile assets or those on-site assets that move around. GIS/GPS technology can be used to track this in real-time.
Asset maintenance management hinges upon its condition; its performance dictates this fact. A predictive maintenance strategy is the most efficient way of keeping assets functioning as intended and can be achieved by connecting sensors with an EAM software system which then analyses this data and triggers maintenance work orders accordingly.