Maintenance, Key to Optimization

Maintenance, Key to Optimization

Both in the industry and in the case of users of technologies that integrate machinery and other equipment, the performance of these takes a primary role to achieve the production of articles or make the service possible. For this reason, maintenance is presented as an excellent opportunity to improve the useful life of machinery and equipment, also optimizing costs and time.

Repairing damaged equipment in any environment is always undesirable, not only because it requires an investment that is not normally programmed for it, but it often means that in the industrial case there are losses due to production stoppage, and in the case of facilities it has effects that can range from discomfort, to the generation of environments not conducive to work, or that can be dangerous.

However, this type of inconvenience can be avoided by developing maintenance programs that in addition to eradicating unpleasant surprises help the optimization of the installation at different levels and thus promote the improvement of the company or installation in general terms.

To implement a maintenance program it is necessary to know the installation well, but it is also important to be clear that to do it successfully an investment must be made, train the staff, have the indispensable tool and undoubtedly plan maintenance cycles.

Depending on the nature of the equipment (including age, origin of the equipment, investment made, final application, restrictions and tolerances) sometimes one or more types of maintenance are chosen.

Its purpose is to anticipate and anticipate failures in machinery and equipment. To do this, the operator considers all the information collected around the system in question. It includes data on energy consumption, temperature, vibration, manufacturing materials, welding types, additional parts, internal parts, connections, and any other related information.

Likewise, by having knowledge of the working conditions it is possible to see if there are greater chances that one or the other part will suffer greater wear as a result of a certain operating condition (e.g. if a piece of equipment is used at a higher temperature than average, it could present greater wear on lubricants or sealing packaging). From this information, a calendar frequency program is designed to make changes to sub-assemblies, parts, repairs, adjustments, oil and lubricant changes, or other elements that are considered important to perform to avoid failures.

From the analysis of main wear and requirements during the operation of the equipment it is possible to schedule the shutdown and take only the time necessary to provide maintenance. Another advantage of performing this programming is that at that time it is possible to make the evaluation of other parts integrated in the same process to make repairs at the time or schedule some other necessary arrangement. This type of maintenance makes it possible to develop capabilities in the corresponding area to generate predictive maintenance programs.

Predictive Maintenance

By having full knowledge of the equipment and the main areas of complication in its useful life, it is possible to generate programs where it is not necessary to wait for the failure of a particular part, but that the changes of spare parts are made with opportunity. This type of maintenance is also simplified when the maintenance area of a company has worked closely with the design of an equipment or system, where simulations of the operation are frequently carried out including sensors, flow monitors, mechanical tests and equipment for non-invasive or destructive analysis that measure parameters such as temperature, vibration and mechanical stress, among others.  This case is especially useful because it helps to know the conditions of the equipment or parts in their real environment.

Ideally, this is the type of maintenance to which all companies and facilities should aspire, since it allows to better manage human, economic and equipment resources, which translate into reduced inventories, greater availability of personnel for other activities, better operation of production lines or facilities and timely change of equipment, among others. In addition, when carrying out a predictive maintenance program, the preventive type is exponentially facilitated and the corrective is practically eliminated, except in isolated cases where unexpected failures occur.

Corrective Maintenance

It is a type of action that is normally not planned and is carried out to repair a piece of equipment or part with imminent failure or that has already caused some productive stoppage or other difficulty in facilities. This is also the case for equipment that simply stops working.

Although if necessary, it is the only option, this type of maintenance has other weaknesses such as preventing the reliable diagnosis of the causes that cause the failure so it is not possible to know if the damage is derived from abuse, abandonment, mismanagement, natural wear, lack of care or is a problem of the piece.

Although corrective maintenance in most cases is a response to a breakdown that forces to stop the damaged equipment, there is also its planned modality, that is, planned corrective maintenance, which refers to the possibility of scheduling repairs when there is availability of personnel, spare parts, technical knowledge and opportunity to carry them out.

Autonomous Maintenance

It is a fundamental part of total productive maintenance – TPM (Total Productive Maintenance), along with preventive actions of continuous improvement, and training related to the equipment.

It basically focuses on the prevention of deterioration in machinery and its components, carried out by the operators and preparers of the equipment during cleaning (it can be taken as an inspection process as long as it is done with own care), handling and operation of the equipment where it is evaluated that no conditions different from the original ones appear at key points to locate cracks, leaks, contamination and lubrication problems, among others. In this way, all personnel related to the systems contribute to the improvement of maintenance, however for this to be possible, they must be previously trained and informed of the program. This training will allow the development of skills that help identify any abnormality, avoiding the generation of other important or repetitive breakdowns, which is frequent in teams that do not receive timely treatment. In addition, it allows the operator or person in charge to have the ability to correct minor inconveniences without having to go to the maintenance area. Thus, autonomous maintenance is part of the concept of total productive maintenance.

Productive Maintenance

This method arose from preventive maintenance and its objective is to maximize the efficiency of the equipment so that it is effectively available at all times of the process, obtaining advantages such as the entire functionality of the equipment in a fraction of time improved. In addition, this maintenance protocol promotes total efficiency, such that in results (or in the case of production) it translates into: eradication of equipment failures, zero defects in production, elimination of occupational accidents, improvement of production cycles and reduction of costs.

To carry it out it is necessary to have good communication and coordination between the different levels of the company or installation since it is essential to have the involvement of all the people who design, use or maintain the equipment through the implementation process that can be slow and expensive, where it is necessary to modify productive habits.

Making a Maintenance Plan

While there are different types of maintenance either for industry or facilities, it is also true that the most popular is the preventive type because it is more easily achieved and its benefits become noticeable shortly after its implementation.

Whatever type of maintenance you are looking to implement according to your needs, it should always be considered a plan, so that all the actions performed are correctly directed and the expected result is achieved.

First of all, the scope of the plan must be defined, to focus on the care of certain equipment or the entire system or plant. It is at this stage that the generation of a budget for the development of the program has to be established, and in this case it is convenient to do it broken down so that the destination of resources is specified.

At the same time, it is essential to define specific goals sought through the preventive maintenance program, for example: what do you want to obtain from the program? Taking this into account, usually the ideal is to start on a limited basis and expand after getting some positive results. For example, taking guidelines such as: increase the availability of equipment by 50%, reduce failures by 70%, or increase the radius of scheduled maintenance with respect to reactive maintenance in proportion 2 to 1. According to the areas where maintenance actions will be applied, these can vary from being changes of lubricant or periodic revisions, to mention a few, to being replacements of large parts or other complex movements. For this reason, it is useful to keep track of the actions and status of equipment and other systems before the implementation of the maintenance plan, since during such a process it is difficult to measure results. However, once the maintenance processes are fully integrated, it is possible to make a detailed comparison, highlighting the benefits obtained.

Start a maintenance program

To carry out the correct actions aimed at the implementation of maintenance within an industrial plant or as part of an installation, it is necessary to create a work plan, or in this case, a maintenance plan.

However, from the moment of the realization of said plan it should be thought that this implies the need to use different resources (human, administrative, team, etc.) that should not be lost sight of, among them:

Extra effort: The people dedicated to maintenance tasks must integrate different data related to the equipment, its handling, characteristics, histories, parts, spare parts and manuals, among others; activity that involves allocating time. In this part of the process you also have to sort the data and make maintenance manuals, including preventive maintenance procedures, determining frequency and use values.

Familiarity: The personnel in charge of the maintenance programs must know well the equipment in question and have knowledge of the objectives set so that the actions carried out have the desired effect, avoiding eventualities. In this regard, since many maintenance-oriented practices are related to sensors and other systems, personnel should be aware of such devices.

Resources: Although scheduled maintenance helps reduce the need to manage large inventories, revisions and activities are scheduled in this regard, the supply of critical spare parts must be ensured, and thus adequately continue the established plan. Likewise, the handling of spare parts is related to the good knowledge of suppliers, delivery times, transit times and costs, among others. This way there will be an opportunity to determine the correct quantities of warehouse items normally used during preventive maintenance.

If necessary, at this time it is also appropriate to determine whether it is feasible to use external services for verification of parts or processes (e.g. valves and programming), such that in due course they should also be scheduled.

Since inventory reduction is one of the most important goals when integrating maintenance programs by making use of an electronic database, you will be able to commit and procure supplies in advance in the next 3 to 6 months, or on consignment. With these actions the investment in inventory will be low and in time just to the need.

Training: The fact that staff at all levels know the maintenance program to be implemented, promotes that an environment conducive to achieving it is generated. However, in the case of personnel directly related to maintenance, as is the case in the maintenance and purchasing area, training is vital to obtain optimal results.

In the case of the technician in charge of the equipment, he must know perfectly its operation and that of its parts. However, the purchasing area must also have the appropriate knowledge to acquire the inputs that offer the best results.  If this point fails, it is possible that the effectiveness will be affected and promote deviations from equipment performance.

Hands on: Implementation of the plan

Once all the necessary information has been gathered to carry out a maintenance program, its implementation is the decisive step in the process. To begin with, a start date can be set so that all personnel involved are aware that the use of (previously established) maintenance procedures begins.  At this time, after reviewing the priority of needs, the operation begins, from which several reports will be generated, which will be useful to continue the flow of information and thus promote new preventive actions.

Thus, lists of preventive maintenance work orders are generated; in a computerized system / automatically with just giving an instruction, where minor adjustments can be made without major difficulty; this with the idea of dispatching work orders nimbly.

Results and new goals

Many well-planned preventive maintenance programs will fail because this step is left out of the plan. If you use a computerized system, there is no reason to overlook this feature. An electronic database provides many reports that can be used to measure performance, with some benchmarks for obtaining measurement parameters such as:

WHAT WAS THE NUMBER of new work orders in the period, qualified as urgent or for emergency repairs?

WHAT IS THE MONTHLY EXPENSE dedicated to labor and materials for maintenance repairs?

HOW MANY TEAMS have chronic problems? What equipment are they? What are these devices used for? How important are they in the production or system?

WHAT IS THE BALANCE between your preventive maintenance actions versus all maintenance actions in general?

WHAT IS THE VALUE of your inventory, what has been the average over the past six months, and how much has it changed since the implementation of the maintenance plan?

WHAT IS THE AVAILABILITY of the equipment from the implementation of the maintenance plan?

The parameters to evaluate the efficiency of the maintenance routine can be very varied and always according to the goals previously set, as well as the complexity of your system or installation. However, the answer to all these questions should be included in the normal reports, that is, the evaluation should not mean extra actions.

Next, it should be reviewed that the results obtained are related to the plan initially designed, which included goals to be achieved energetically, in saving time and resources, among others. For example: if a particular team frequently appears with maintenance needs in the reports, the indicated thing is to reassess the work plan to propose new operations that help to fulfill the initial plans.

In another case, if the program does not seem to give results by achieving the proposed goals, then it will be the goals that must be adjusted, carrying out a detailed review and making the appropriate adjustments.

Conclusions

Optimizing is a solution that all entrepreneurs and facility owners want to do for all the benefits that can be obtained, and although in many cases achieving this goal involves the integration of extra resources. Through maintenance plans, an efficient optimization can be achieved by only properly planning the actions to be followed, obtaining:

Reduction of failures and downtime. To the extent that it is possible to maintain the entire process or system, urgent or reactive repairs are avoided (or once the equipment is unused), and this means having greater availability of equipment and facilities.

In addition, by maintaining parts and subsystems, the generalized breakdown of equipment is avoided, which helps to prolong its useful life.

Better use of resources. Since a well-structured maintenance program helps plan inventory expenses (and reduce warehouse usage) and schedule the frequency and prioritization of revisions, you have more capital to allocate to new investments or improvements. This extends to human resources that can also be allocated according to needs for reviews or follow-up training.  On the other hand, well-calibrated equipment in good condition consumes less energy for its operation than others, that is, there are significant savings, which vary according to the machinery, level of maintenance and type of technology.

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