Many facilities do not care about maintenance until it is too late. They wait for the equipment to undergo breakdown before moving a muscle. It may work as a temporary solution but may have disastrous long term effects.
In the end, it results in the company going through a halt in production and financial losses.
If your enterprise is one of them, you need to change the mindset from a reactive to a proactive one. A planned preventive maintenance program, along with a preventive maintenance software, is the key to ensure all equipment is safe and in working condition.
What is Preventive Maintenance?
Preventive maintenance is an approach that takes cautionary action before any failure occurs in the equipment. For this reason, it is also called planned maintenance. It includes routine inspections of all the assets, the gathering of calibration data, and scheduled servicing.
How To Start Preventive Maintenance Program In Your Organisation
Build A Preventive Maintenance Team
Before you can think about building up your excellent preventive management program, you must first build your team.
An ideal team will include top-level managers, maintenance technicians, data analysts, and people from finance, accounting, and production. Additionally, the team must be focused and invested in this project for its successful implementation.
Sometimes, mentioning a new type of work is enough to bring a new member. You can also bring them on board by piquing their interest and using terms relevant to their skills.
The first step is always the hardest. It will take some tact to bring new members to the team. However, once you are done, you can begin starting building your maintenance goals.
Prepare Preventive Maintenance Goals
Once you have signed up an effective and willing maintenance team, the next course of action is to set forth maintenance goals. It will help to give the team a direction and keep them motivated to accomplish a result.
However, the goals must be quantifiable, meaning you can measure them. Without proper metrics, there will be no way to determine if you have accomplished many goals.
Some examples of these may include a percentage reduction of reactive maintenance costs or a decrease in downtime. It may also include the operating time of the machinery throughout a period.
Survey the Instruments and Assets
The next step may consume a lot of time; however, it is the most rewarding in the long run.
It involves counting the number of all available equipment and putting them down on a list. The idea is to prepare an inventory list of all equipment available in the facility.
This step also requires you to take notes of the model, make, serial number, asset specifications, identification numbers, and location. The more data you have on the equipment, the better it will be in the long run.
It will be helpful to also write down about the current condition of the equipment. It will help you prioritize the assets in bad conditions and enable recovery of the equipment.
Create Maintenance Procedures
After you have prepared a list of all the instruments and assets, you now have to create a procedure to execute the maintenance tasks. It will list the frequency and maintenance processes for every piece of equipment.
Sometimes, the maintenance frequency will be based on hours of usage. On other occasions, they will be scheduled at set time intervals.
However, you can use preventive maintenance software to make sure that you do not confuse the situations. It will also help you understand the average time required for maintenance operations.
As a whole, preventive maintenance should help create a checklist with the list of parts, standard procedure, and estimated time for the task. It can enable you to keep track of equipment maintenance.
Create a Priority List
Now that you have created a working procedure for every asset’s maintenance, you need to prioritize the tasks.
Although preventive maintenance is a necessity, it involves a lot of time, energy, and workforce. Spending too much time on maintenance can hamper production. Hence, you need to prepare maintenance tasks’ priority list.
Equipment that is most valuable to the company in terms of operation or cost will be at the top of the priority list. Now, separate high priority tasks based on their frequency by beginning with long-duration tasks first.
It is because long-term equipment will require a longer time for maintenance. As such, it is best to do it when the production is not loaded with work.
After this, complete shorter duration tasks of high priority, and follow it up for low priority tasks.
It is also necessary to keep enough spare time in your hand to deal with maintenance tasks. So, plan accordingly. If you have all the equipment on your preventive maintenance software, it will help you choose the tasks based on these key performance indicators.
Train Your Team to Use Software
Technology can make your life a lot easier. You can invest in CMMS software that is user friendly and contains resources. More importantly, you need a team that is willing to learn the technology.
You need to explain the many benefits of CMMS to them. Tell them how it can help them with their scheduled tasks, inventory management, and more.
Bear in mind that not everyone has a smooth learning curve, and some of it may be difficult for some. You need to keep motivating your team and be patient as they slowly adopt the CMMS software.
You also need to understand that it does not work like magic. It will take time for employees to adjust to the new lifestyle. Hence, you need to begin with simple functions initially and increase the complexity as the employees become adept.
Adapt and Evolve
Businesses, equipment, and personnel are ever-changing.
Hence, many of the procedures and schedules also require changes. It is necessary to assess these changes and rise on top. You need to realize that preventive maintenance is a field that relies on continuous improvement.
You will need to adapt to these changes and evolve your team to make the most out of the CMMS benefits. It will help your team stay relevant with the changing times.
Conclusion
Preventive maintenance is a defensive shield that protects your organization from harm’s way. However, it can be quite challenging if you do not prepare a planned maintenance schedule.
Additionally, you need to understand the CMMS benefits and keep upgrading yourself with technology and trained professionals.
