How to Shift from Reactive Maintenance Practices to Strategic Asset Management Initiatives

Manufacturing is asset-heavy, using various assets ranging in size and functionality. These assets are as critical for the accuracy, quality, and performance of the products and the business itself as the raw materials, the skills of the team, and the processes used for manufacturing. Therefore, asset management is important and covers everything from the purchase of the asset to operating, maintaining, and disposing of it.

Some of the key reasons for ensuring proper maintenance of the machinery include:

• Extend the lifespan of the asset and improve the return on investment
• Prevent disruption of schedules due to unplanned downtime
• Reduce the expense of repairs caused by negligence
• Efficient asset usage is also crucial for reducing energy consumption and operating costs
• Demonstrate compliance by maintaining proper service records, which will also increase their resale value
• A well-maintained equipment also reduces the risk of safety incidents due to improper parts functioning

Reactive vs Proactive Maintenance

Keeping assets such as machinery and tools functioning at 100% efficiency is essential for businesses to improve their profitability, compliance, and competitiveness. Maintenance can be of four types:

Reactive Maintenance: Also called breakdown or run-to-failure maintenance, the machine is fixed after a breakdown. It is unplanned and can result in disruption of the production processes due to unplanned downtime. It can also cause injury to the operator or damage to the equipment. In addition to stopping production, there may be delays in resuming operations due to the unavailability of spare parts or a repairman needing to be available to service it immediately. If parts shipping is expedited, it can add to the costs. Therefore, to avoid prolonged downtime and steep maintenance costs, it is essential to have a more proactive and planned approach to machine maintenance.

Preventive Maintenance: In preventive maintenance, manufacturers use a proactive approach by periodically planning downtime to inspect machines, perform repairs, and conduct regular maintenance at set intervals. This extends the machine’s lifespan, helps prevent unplanned downtimes proactively, and ensures no time delays in product release. But for this to be effective, it is essential to ensure consistency and data to support the maintenance activities and make them meaningful. Not overwhelming technicians will be another task to ensure effective maintenance.

Predictive Maintenance: This is a more advanced option in which sensors and machine data alert quality leaders about potential equipment failures and help implement mitigative action to prevent repairs. This helps gain deeper insights into machine performance, effect cost savings, and make maintenance-related decisions based on real-time data about the equipment condition instead of gut feel or other inaccurate means.

Reliability-Centered Maintenance: However much one may try to be proactive or predictive in identifying potential issues, there will always be surprises that cannot be avoided. However, using the reliability-centered approach to maintenance helps use past data to determine failure patterns and create a bespoke maintenance plan to increase the reliability and efficiency of the equipment. This is a risk-based approach where failure risks can be ranked based on severity and frequency and resources used efficiently to mitigate them effectively.

Strategic Asset Management Initiatives for Improving Equipment Efficiency

Most organizations need a mix of all four approaches. But most important is having a clear strategy for their asset management initiatives. This must be supported by appropriate training and information sharing to ensure that all operators and maintenance staff know the SOPs and respond appropriately to equipment maintenance needs.

Some of the key steps that should be part of the asset management strategy include:

Step 1: Creating, documenting, and sharing policies and procedures for equipment maintenance.

Step 2: Creating workflows with clearly assigned roles and responsibilities to ensure the policies are implemented, and there is compliance with internal and external standards.

Step 3: Identify gaps between the current system and the objectives of the maintenance strategy and fill them by investing in training and automating workflows.

Step 4: Identify the solution that best fits the company’s maturity level and can help it strengthen its maintenance operations to achieve its goals.

Step 5: Streamline data management for drawing insights and enabling proactive and predictive asset management using a risk-based approach.

Step 6: Audit and inspect equipment and the maintenance process periodically to ensure it is effective and identify areas of improvement.

Step 7: Facilitate proper documentation and reporting to identify issues early, address them, review progress, and continuously improve the process.

ComplianceQuest provides a cloud-based Equipment Management solution that enables the implementation of a data-driven, risk-based, proactive, and predictive maintenance strategy to maximize equipment performance, improve the quality of the processes and products, and lower the cost of asset ownership. It is integrated with the CQ EQMS, which also provides features for audit, inspection, training, documentation, compliance, and nonconformance, making it a scalable and robust solution for end-to-end management of quality and assets. To know more, visit: www.compliancequest.com