Plant Maintenance

Overview - A typical manufacturing organization may have more than a few thousand pieces of equipment. Plant and Maintenance, all the machines/ equipment for maintenance in the system can be managed. Various maintenance activities can be defined that need to be performed for a machine, e.g. oiling, greasing, overhauling, breakdown etc. Reckoned Plant and Maintenance also allows definition for cost & frequency of each activity for preventive maintenance. Each activity can then be booked in discrete maintenance orders and confirmed thereafter. all types supports of maintenance methods like Preventive, Predictive and Emergency Maintenance using definable order types and process settings for different machines. If possible, the complete BOM structure for any machine may be defined, which will help in identifying the spare part requirements for the machines. Since frequency of each activity is defined this BOM will be used by MRP for planning of spare parts.

Whether maintenance planning is carried out on automatic or manual basis, Plant and Maintenance works on the basis of individual Maintenance Order for each machine/activity. All the Maintenance Orders (manually entered or system created) can then be summarized into the Maintenance Planning Wizard which can then help in the creation of an effective maintenance schedule. The "whereused list" and maintenance history may also suggest availability of spares in existing machines. Maintenance Order can automatically generate a requisition for spares or other material based on maintenance type. Material can be issued and costs booked for the order/machine. All types of resources used in maintenance like mechanics, tools, measuring instruments, cranes, jack etc. can be defined. There are 4 types of possible resources - Man, Material, Machines and others. The Logbook entries and the frequency for maintenance activities defined in the definition can be used to create the schedule for Preventive Maintenance. Periodic Inspection of the machines forms the basis of Predictive

Plant Maintenance - The Six levers of Change - Large scale change in Maintenance can only be successfully implemented by focusing on all the key "pressure points" in plant that will repay your efforts. These can be conceptualised as lying along several dimensions. Here is useful to formalise these dimensions through the concept of the levers of change, as outlined below.

Customers and Stakeholders
Your vision of the present and future may include differences in the way that the Maintenance function, or indeed your entire plant, will (or should) view and segment its customer base.

Products and Markets
The refined focus on customers you envision may be accompanied by changes in the scope and variety of Maintenance services that you are providing to your customers.

Business Processes
There will probably be a gap in the way your Maintenance processes operate now and the way they will need to operate in the future in order to provide better service to your organisation. You may already perceive the need to introduce a new set of pointedly relevant performance measures to measure Maintenance efficiency and effectiveness.

People and Culture
Your vision may include differences in the kinds of people you will need, systems and measures for rewarding them, and the culture that sends them daily signals concerning "how we do business" and "what we are all about" in a Maintenance context.

Organisation
There is probably a gap between the organisation structure today and its best future configuration. New workshops and other facilities may also appear in your vision of the kind of future worth having.

Technology
Finally, your vision may reveal a gap between the information-based technologies in place today and those needed to remain competitive in the future. These could include your choice of Computerised Maintenance Management System, and any other information systems that you may use to support your maintenance efforts.

It is common in change efforts to fail to focus on all the levers of change rather than the one or two that, due to their backgrounds, team members may regard as their province. We have found that successful Maintenance change programs consider all of the levers of change, and implement change in an integrated way, pulling all of these levers in a co-ordinated and balanced fashion.

Plan a Clear Path to Reliability Improvements How plant management can plan a clear path toward reliability improvements. It's common for us to have an unclear or disjointed view of what actually needs to be done in order to excel in reliability. For example, is there a unified plan for achieving higher equipment reliability before we start new projects? Do all involved employees understand the plan and how it's to be executed? If not, let me suggest a simple approach to create a plan. Create a detailed plan by following these five steps:

1) Get all necessary people involved. If someone creathat. The creation of a valid improvement team and awareness of the reliability process is the most important process step. Here es a plan alone, there will be no buy in. It's as simple as tare some important things to think about when creating the team:

• The team must have clout in the organization and management must take part.
• Involve operations, maintenance and engineering.
• The bigger the team, the more buy-in.
• The bigger the team, the longer the process will take.
• The facilitator must create reliability awareness by having a good plan in mind.
• The facilitator must be respected by the organization and viewed as a leader for the improvement effort.

2) Create a vision and mission statement for maintenance management. A vision statement explains where a plant wants to be in the future. A mission statement explains how the plant gets there. A simple example that has worked well in the past:

• Vision: We will achieve 80 percent of our agreed-upon best practices by 2010.
• Mission: We will execute the best practices.

Keep the mission and vision statements as simple as possible.

3) Create a checklist for best practices. The best practices in maintenance management are actions that will cost-effectively improve equipment reliability. By executing the items in the list, your plant should believe it can achieve better equipment reliability and, therefore, lower costs.
Organize best practices in a simple format. It's a good idea to divide the best practices in work processes. Define work processes by documentation, execution and follow-up. For example:

• Document a definition for a planned job.
• Execute job planning according to the definition in point 1.
• Follow up by assessing the percentage of jobs that are correctly planned. Another example:
• Document condition monitoring on- the-run inspections for mechanical equipment.
• Execute the condition monitoring routes described in point 1.
• Measure (follow-up = route compliance and number of corrective work orders initiated by doing condition monitoring routes for mechanical equipment).

4) Prioritize the checklist and create a detailed plan. Prioritize the items the plant should work on by assessing current performance against the best practice checklist. Select only a few items and make a detailed implementation plan for each item, including training and support.

5) Audit plan progress by using the best practice checklist. To become instituted, monitor and reinforce any process improvement or project. Use the checklist to assess how well the organization is performing. I suggest you create a scoring system and create a gap analysis report for auditing purposes.