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The success of any given facility or production plant is anchored on a well-implemented preventive maintenance (PM) plan. It saves thousands of dollars in emergency repair expenses, prolongs the life of assets, and saves companies the amount of time spent on downtime. Nevertheless, it is not very easy to write a PM plan based on the recommendations found in an equipment manual.
More than is desirable, maintenance leaders have become stuck in strategic pitfalls that make their efforts ineffective or even unproductive. You may want to consider a second look at your strategy, when your team always must put out fires, even though you have a schedule.
To begin with, let's examine the top five errors that companies commit in writing a preventive maintenance plan- and how you can prevent them.
Avoiding prioritization of your assets is one of the most serious mistakes in the sphere of maintenance planning. In the rush to implement, there can be a tendency to take a blanket approach where a breakroom HVAC unit is as urgent as a core production conveyor belt.
Become risk-averse by developing an entire asset inventory. Do Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) rank equipment in terms of impact on production, safety and replacement cost. Lastly, schedule your maintenance so that you use most of your time and resources on high-priority machinery.
Spread sheets and paper records may be considered cheap and easy in managing maintenance; however, it is a shortcut to a nightmare of manual planning. They make such information silos disconnected, which is extremely hard to sustain as your facility expands.
Move to a Computerized Maintenance Management System. A modern CMMS automates the creation of work orders, is real-time tracked, and available on a mobile basis. Technicians will be able to enter data at the plant floor directly and have an accurate live database that can be used to facilitate proactive maintenance.
The desire to be more reliable is a wonderful thing to wish for, however, a terrible thing to pursue. Running without definite, measurable Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) is having no method of demonstrating whether your PM program is viable, or you are merely wasting time in labor.
Lack of a baseline or target keeps the maintenance teams in a reactive loop. You are unable to make budget requests, prioritize your backlog in an effective way, or hold staff responsible to meet their schedules until you are tracking the data.
Develop an objective scorecard which is directly connected to your overall business goals. Track metrics like:
Drafting schedules "from behind a desk." Planners and managers often rely on outdated equipment manuals or their own past experiences to write job plans, completely bypassing the technicians who work on the machinery every single day.
Bridge the gap between the office and the plant floor by actively involving your technicians in the planning phase and establishing formal feedback loops to continuously refine job plans.
Making a preventive maintenance plan for a one-time project. Most teams create a schedule and stick to it year after year without changing it due to aging equipment, new environments or changed volumes of production.
Adopt the concept of constant change and implement a regular audit of your PM performance and move high-principal assets towards Condition-Based Maintenance (CBM) based on real-time sensor information.
These five mistakes can only be avoided with organization, communication, and solid information which are so hard to accomplish manually. Cryotos CMMS comes in at that point.
Cryotos is the focal nervous system of your maintenance operations. Our platform enables you to:
The effective preventive maintenance plan writing is a dynamic process, which presupposes prioritization of assets, empowerment of technicians, and the use of data-driven tools. You can make your maintenance department a profit generator by auditing your strategy to avoid these pitfalls when you transform it into a proactive cost center instead of a reactive cost center.
Habits like bad ones will not drag your facility. Check out your existing plan now, figure out these pitfalls, and provide your team with the resources to achieve success.
