Breakdown v/s Preventive maintenance is a dilemma of many organizations which has heavily invested in Capital Assets.
Breakdown maintenance is when the organization only conducts maintenance on a piece of equipment when the equipment breaks down. Preventive, and even predictive maintenance, is when an organization conducts maintenance activities, including inspections, to help ensure equipment is functioning within their expected parameters and to catch indications of minor issues, so that they can be addressed before a bigger problem occurs.
What is wrong with a breakdown maintenance approach?
A management system focuses on being proactive. While this strategy is reactive, plus this is disruptive to an organization, because you can’t plan when the equipment will break down. The fallout from a breakdown can be multiple, like Quality, Production loss, Health and Safety, Regulatory.
Though from definition Preventive maintenance looks as best approach for any organization yet cost associated with it must justify in comparison with production loss. No preventive maintenance action is performed unless proven to be less costly than the failure. Important aspect of adopting Preventive maintenance strategy in organization is availability of quality data to design robust cost effective preventive maintenance schedules.
How often should we perform any one PM procedure?
Frequency of performing a PM should be based on asset failure rate (Mean Time Between Failure) rather than the NON-failure rate.
New age robust EAM (Enterprise Asset Management) solutions plays bigger role here. EAM solution should be able to provide accurate data to decide when, what, how and how much to do.
IFS Applications agile EAM Solution helps organizations in this switch from Breakdown to Preventive maintenance strategy. It allows organizations to begin with simple minimum required PM schedules and to transform later in to robust PM strategy to derive best business benefits.
EAM solution offered by IFS Applications breaks further into Basic Data, Master Data, PM Configurations and Maintenance Process Configurations. This break up is further drilled below,
Basic Data Configuration: Structured Configuration of 4 strong pillars for healthy maintenance organization to capture analyze data at detailed level.
- Equipment Basic Data.
- Maintenance Operations Basic Data.
- Preventive Maintenance Basic Data.
- Maintenance Organization Basic Data.
Master Data Configuration:
Creation of robust equipment structure to aid root cause analysis of failure. IFS Applications user defined flexible equipment structure helps in analyzing failures and correct PM schedules accordingly.
Organizations can create multilevel equipment structure with levels as
- Equipment Type
- Main Functional Area
- Subcomponents
- Spares within subcomponents
Organizations can further add positions at any level where there are multiple objects at any levels.
This structured data configuration allows user to capture incident or actions at appropriate level of structure.
Preventive Maintenance Configuration: IFS Applications allow complex PM configurations with ease and offers extreme flexibility.
PM schedules can be configured based on,
- Calendar Based Maintenance.
- Condition Based Maintenance.
- Event Based Maintenance.
User can not only define PM actions based on above but can configure more complex criteria like mix of above with whichever is earlier.
System allows you to structure preventive maintenance schedules with required operations and material for each schedule to facilitate smooth workforce and material planning. Recurring actions to be performed and material required for it can be configured as standard jobs.
IFS EAM Solutions with key “the right information in the right time” helps in knowing which equipment needs maintenance, work can be better planned (spare parts, people etc.) What would have been “unplanned stops” are transformed to shorter and fewer “planned stops”, thus increasing plant availability. Other advantages include increased equipment lifetime, increased plant safety, and optimized spare parts handling.
Maintenance Process integration within EAM to capitalize on PM optimization:
- Preventive and Breakdown Maintenance.
- Complete Work Order Management.
- Spare Part Management.
- Warranty Management.
- Fuel Management.
- External Repair Process and outsourcing.
- Cost Management on parameters of Material, Labour and External Services.
Moreover, the planned maintenance of equipment will help improve equipment life and avoid any unplanned maintenance activity. A successful preventive maintenance program is dependent on the cooperation of all the parties involved and accuracy and timing of the data required to adopt PM Strategy. The implementation of a preventive maintenance program can be time consuming and costly and creates constant debate as to whether a preventive maintenance program is worth utilizing. Will the man hours and money invested in the program outweigh emergency repairs? From our experience, we believe that when a program is properly operated the benefits exceed the costs.
IFS applications EAM solution helps in coming out of this dilemma with simplification of Preventive Maintenance approach and optimized solution reaping important benefits of a properly operated preventive maintenance program.
Few of the salient benefits are listed below:
- Production capacity is increased and the numbers of repairs are reduced
- Better conservation of assets and increased life expectancy of assets, thereby eliminating premature replacement of machinery and equipment
- Reduced overtime costs and more economical use of maintenance workers due to working on a scheduled basis instead of an emergency basis to repair breakdowns
- Timely, routine repairs circumvent fewer large-scale repairs
- Improved safety and quality conditions for everyone
- Better ROI on assets due to high availability and reliability
