ENHANCE YOUR PRODUCTION EFFICIENCY WITH A WELL-

GROUNDED MAINTENANCE STRATEGY:

A robust maintenance strategy can boost your production efficiency by optimizing equipment
usage. To achieve this, you need to periodically track progress and make necessary amendments.
There are two kinds of key performance indicators which companies can track for monitoring the
effectiveness of their equipment maintenance strategy.
 Estimated versus actual performance and compliance;
 Past events such as mean time to repair, overall equipment effectiveness and mean time
between failure.
By documenting these metrics, you can generate valuable insights which can signal future business
growth. Actionable reports help dictate (order) movement in the right direction and tackle any
maintenance challenges along the way. This not only reduces your costs but drives you to achieve
maximum operational efficiency.

NATURE OF MAINTENANCE PROBLEM:

Maintenance can be classifies as follow.
1. General classification of maintenance problems
a) Mechanical Failure
b) Thermal Failure
c) Chemical Failure
2. Classification of maintenance problem based on time span
a) Short Run Maintenance Problem
b) Long Run Maintenance Problem

GENERAL CLASSIFICATION MAINTENANCE PROBLEMS:

Mechanical Failure:
 Worn out bushes and bearings and other moving parts.
 Fatigue of machine members
 Creep of material at high temp
 Excessive forced vibration, misalignments etc.
Thermal Failure
 Overheating of the component
 Lack of lubrication
 Inadequate of cooling
 Electrical insulation failure
Chemical Failure:
 Highly corrosive fluids containing abrasive particles
 Failure of protective linings like glass, rubber etc.

CLASSIFICATION MAINTENANCE PROBLEM BASED ON TIME SPAN:

Short run production problem
Maintenance problem which are carried out in a short period of time are known as short run
production system. It may be hourly, daily, weekly and monthly.

Example:-

Hourly- inspection of correct lubricant, level of coolant, sharpness of cutting tool.

Daily- tightening of nuts, correct cooling, inspection of various indicators, and minor adjustment
of parts.

Weekly- Major adjustment, lubrication, tightening of parts.

Monthly- checking for insulation, corrosion, safety guards, checking of worn-out and distorted
parts.

WHAT YOU CAN DO TO LOOK AFTER YOUR EQUIPMENT

Care and maintenance of equipment is everyone's responsibility, there is a lot you can do to look
after and prolong the life of the equipment you use.

1. Learn as much as you can about the equipment you use

 Find out where the manual is kept-and make time to read it. If possible, keep the manuals
close to the equipment.

 Look at ‘Useful resources’ (page 36) for additional sources of information.

2. Check equipment before use (or at least once a week)

  Inspect equipment for any sign of damage or parts that may need repair or
replacement, and lubricate as necessary (according to instructions).

3. Tell someone if there is a problem

 As a user, it is your responsibility to report any problems. You will most likely be the
first person to know that something is not working as it should.

 Don't assume that someone else will report a fault-what if everyone thinks that someone
else will report it?

 It may sound obvious, but a repair can't be attended to if nobody knows there is a
problem. The longer you take to report it, the longer before the repair will take place.

 Don't wait for equipment to break down before reporting a fault. Even a small change
in how the equipment moves or how it responds could indicate that something has gone
wrong or that a part needs to be replaced soon. If left unchecked, a more serious fault
may occur, which will be more expensive and time-consuming to repair.

4. Clean equipment after use and lubricate when necessary

 Dust and then clean equipment with the appropriate cleaning agents and solutions.

 Lubricate moving equipment as often as indicated. Always follow the instructions.

5. Protect equipment when not in use

 Store equipment in a clean environment where it is not in danger of falling and
breaking.

 When transporting equipment, pack items securely and handle with care.

MAINTENANCE TIPS TO EXTEND EQUIPMENT LIFE:

Heavy machinery, especially Mining, Industrial, etc. requires constant maintenance to keep it in
good working order. Conversely, poorly maintained large machinery equipment runs inefficiently.
Breakdowns are costly and safety is also an important consideration.

Here are five top tips for large machinery maintenance:

1. Keep Daily Records of Use and Oversee Operation:
Keeping records of machinery use and monitoring daily operations can help pinpoint when and
where the machinery is being used by inadequately skilled operators.

Many types of large machinery have multiple operators. One of the ongoing inspections on any
checklist should be overseeing the correct operation of the equipment.

Large machinery should be inspected as soon as it is purchased. Operator training is essential but
training needs to be kept up. Employees come and go, skills become rusty and poor operation leads
to breakdowns.

Operator manuals can be revised for the specific work situation. They can be rewritten in simpler
language. A short manual can be provided to each operator for easy reference.

A new way to oversee the operations of large machinery is via GPS. The device tracks movement
and records it in digital records, which are organized to be easily retrieved. Problems can be caught
early, and breakdowns can be prevented.

2. Maintain a Schedule of Planned Maintenance:

Components break down, and wear is inevitable (unavoidable). Establish forecasts for the expected
life of all components and replace them on schedule. Part replacement must be done by
knowledgeable technicians.

Bearings are key components of heavy machinery equipment and can be easily damaged or worn.
Bearing housings should be regularly maintained, including inspection for corrosion and wear, and
replaced when necessary. A maintenance log should also be kept to ensure regular checks are not
missed and compliance is measured. Know what needs to be inspected and when. Here are some
examples.

 Power transmissions have many moving parts that need to be maintained in top condition.
Gearboxes need to be checked for lubrication, vibration and damage to parts.
 Friction materials, seals, gaskets and bearings all need to be inspected for wear and
replaced. Gears and shafts usually last a long time and don’t need to be replaced often, if
at all.
 Do a seal check to prevent bearing raceway (Channel, Conduit) contamination
3. Add and Test Lubricate Frequently:
Lubrication is one of the first and most important of maintenance checks. Lubricants reduce
friction around any moving part. A schedule of good lubrication maintenance extends the life of
large machinery equipment and parts. Look for signs of excess oil or grease build-up on pistons.
Check for leaks around oil seals.

Be sure to use the right lubricant. There are specific kinds of oil and grease for every component.
Check the manufacturer’s recommendations.

Getting the lubricants checked is a good way to diagnose problems with large machinery. Experts
analyze particles in the used oil. The makeup of any contaminants will indicate which part may be
suffering from wear or breakdown.

Contamination can lead to machinery breakdown. Water is a major source of corrosion.

Lubrication prevents corrosion. Maintaining seals and replacing filters will help keep lubricants
free of contaminants.

Fluid analysis should also be part of a regular maintenance schedule. Analysis of used lubricants
and other fluids is an excellent way to diagnose problems and prevent machinery wear and
breakdown. Identifying contaminants in the fluids can lead analysts to the source of wear and
damage.

4. Inspect and Monitor Components for Wear and Damage:

Vibration, shock, high temperatures, friction and age all contribute to the breakdown of parts in
heavy machinery.

 Vibration can come from gears and belts that are out of alignment
 Shock can come from accidents and from poor operator technique
 High temperatures can come from extended use, friction, poor lubrication and worn parts,
among other reasons
 Age affects many key components. Over time, belts will warp. Seals will dry and crack.
Bolts will loosen and stretch out of shape. Age is a factor to monitor in equipment.
 5. Keep large machinery clean, and maintain a clean environment:
There are many seals and filters in place on heavy machinery to keep working parts clean and free
of contamination. Seals should be inspected regularly to make sure they’re in good condition
Breathers should be kept clean to avoid creating a vacuum in the cab which will suck contaminants
into the cab. The electronics in the cab are susceptible to breakdown if contaminated.

Large machinery should be stored in a shed or other building if at all possible. Exposure to wind
and weather can lead to rust and rot. The machinery should be run periodically if it is not in use.

To conclude, following the above 5 steps can significantly extend the useful life of heavy
machinery, improving the Return on Investment

1. 5 common causes of equipment failure

2. Cause #1: Improper operation
3. Cause #2: Failure to perform preventive maintenance
4. Cause #3: Too much preventive maintenance
5. Cause #4: Failure to continuously monitor equipment
6. Cause #5: Bad (or no!) reliability culture
7. The bottom line
Equipment failure happens. The impact of it can run the gamut from easily fixed with
minimal losses to catastrophic, depending on factors like repair costs, total downtime,
health and safety implications, and impact on production and delivery of services.

There are several common reasons equipment can break down, and understanding why
your equipment may be failing is your first line of defence against the serious
consequences of unplanned downtime.

5 common causes of equipment failure

Cause #1: Improper operation
There are a whole bunch of people who might be in and around equipment on a daily
basis who could have a significant impact on its overall operating condition.

Equipment operators are one such group. They typically receive in-depth training on
appropriate operating procedures, basic troubleshooting, and best practices for safe
equipment use relevant to the machines they’ll be working with. However, the day might
come when an operator ends up working on a machine they haven’t been adequately
trained for. Sometimes this situation arises as a result of short staffing or unexpected
absences. Other times emergencies come up that require quick remediation with
available staff who might not necessarily have the level of expertise that your most
experienced operators have.
One solution to these problems is to ensure that you have enough trained operators to
allow for some flexibility and a contingency plan for staff shortage emergencies. If
possible, all of your operators should have some training on every piece of equipment—
even assets they don’t typically work with.

Most importantly, never allow an operator to use equipment they are not qualified to run.
Not only will this help to reduce operational errors, but in some industries, it’s imperative
for regulatory compliance. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) sets
regulations for operator training requirements for certain types of equipment and for
general occupational safety. It’s up to you, however, to know the regulations applicable
to your industry and ensure that you have adequate compliance procedures in place.
Cause #2: Failure to perform preventive maintenance
Most equipment requires regular maintenance for optimal performance, but too
often, preventive maintenance is the first task to go when you’re short-staffed and
overwhelmed. It’s easy to brush off regular maintenance when things seem to be
running just fine, and many companies work under the assumption that experienced
workers will identify impending trouble before equipment fails entirely.
That said, many of the subtle signs of slowing performance or the early stages of failure
aren’t easily detectable and often go unnoticed. In other cases, companies simply lack
efficient planning methods for ensuring that ongoing maintenance is performed. Tracking
equipment and machinery with asset tags can help to keep maintenance schedules on
track and equipment operating at maximum operational efficiency.
Preventive maintenance is one ongoing function that should never be allowed to fall by
the wayside. Taking care of your equipment with regular tune-ups will extend the usable
life of your equipment, ultimately giving you more for every dollar. Additionally,
preventive maintenance can identify small problems with inexpensive solutions before
they become major, costly breakdowns. When you use effective inventory
control strategies to ensure that you have the right spare parts in supply for the most
common maintenance tasks and malfunctions, downtime for routine maintenance and
repairs is minimal. In fact, the U.S. Department of Energy estimates that preventive
maintenance results in:
 Up to a 30% reduction in energy and maintenance costs
 35% to 45% fewer breakdowns
 Reductions in downtime by up to 75%
Cause #3: Too much preventive maintenance
“Surely this is a mistake,” you’re thinking. “You just told me that NOT doing preventive
maintenance will cause things to break.” It’s true— there’s a bit of a Goldilocks situation
going on when it comes to preventive maintenance. Not enough can be problematic for
the reasons we outlined above, but too much is also a major cause for concern.

We’ve written about this in-depth before, so check out this blog if you want to get deeper
into the concept of post-maintenance breakdowns. But here are the Coles Notes: Every time
you get into a machine to maintain it, you open up that piece of equipment to a whole
set of risks, and over time those risks can compound and lead to failure.
Think of it in terms of surgery— a triple bypass is a life-saving operation. But you don’t
want to undergo open heart surgery on a regular basis simply because a few years
have passed, or your heart has beat a few million times. But so often, that’s exactly how
we approach preventive maintenance. It’s done on a predefined schedule (generally
time- or usage-based) without taking the actual operating condition of the asset into
consideration.

Which brings us to…

Cause #4: Failure to continuously monitor equipment

So how do you find the right balance of preventive maintenance? The cure here is
simple in concept but a bit more complex in execution: condition-based maintenance. This
is maintenance that’s done based on the operating condition of a piece of equipment,
instead of just a ‘set it and forget it’ schedule. It takes a lot of things into account, from
manufacturer information equipment history to real-time data like vibration analysis.
Continuous monitoring relies on sensor data to establish a baseline for what good
equipment condition looks like in order to detect subtle changes, which can be used to
predict breakdowns and failures. This allows more time for contingency planning and
scheduling downtime to minimize production interruptions. This type of monitoring and
the data that’s collected in the process can help companies identify the causes of
increased stress on machinery and adjust workloads and schedules to lessen the load
on equipment showing early indicators of impending failure.

The catch here is that this is actually really hard to do if you’re managing maintenance
with pen and paper or Excel. If this is where you want your maintenance operations to
go, it might be time to consider moving to a digital maintenance solution.
Cause #5: Bad (or no!) reliability culture
Everyone has been there— major pressure from the top means there’s not a second to
spare if you have any hope of hitting your production goals. In these circumstances, it
can be so tempting (and so easy) for an operator or maintenance worker to notice
something’s not working at 100%, slap a band-aid solution on it and say, “I’ll figure this
out when things calm down”. The problem is that realistically, things never calm down to
the extent where you’ll have time to revisit that work. Which means that band-aid
solution becomes a semi-permanent solution until it stops working and becomes and
full-fledged failure.

A really good example of this is Boeing. You’re probably familiar with the two deadly
crashes involving the company’s 737 Max aircraft, which raised questions about
whether Boeing’s rush to get the plane through production led the company to take
safety risks that ultimately resulted in the crashes.

But the quieter story concerns a different plane model— the 787 Dreamliner. Several
whistleblowers have come forward to raise the alarm about the Dreamliners, which were
manufactured in 2009 at a then-new plant near Charleston, South Carolina. From the
beginning, sloppy production was an issue which was consistently swept under the rug
in favour of aggressive production schedules.

If you want the full story, check out the full New York Times article here (or the
related podcast from the Daily if you’re more of an audio person). But long story short,
the issues at Boeing are a really good example of competitive pressure at the highest
levels of a business having a ripple effect all the way down the chain of command, right
to the factory floor. Bad culture at the top creates a “get it done quickly” mentality that
can result in devastating oversights, band-aid solutions, and mistakes.
So what if bad culture is at the root of your equipment failure? What can you do? We’ve
covered the topic of how to start establishing a culture that’s focused on reliability, so go
ahead and check out one (or all!) of these pieces to give yourself a firm foundation in
reliability.

The bottom line: Trained operators, a solid PM

schedule and a focus on reliability culture are your
tickets to a failure-free future (or at least fewer
failures)
Equipment can be unpredictable, and failure happens. People make mistakes, parts get
old, and sometimes preventive maintenance is just the one thing too many in an already
busy day. But by ensuring adequate operator training, running preventive or condition-
based maintenance at the right time, and working towards a better overall culture, you’ll
have a much better shot at keeping your equipment running in tip-top shape.

10 COMMON ROUTINE MAINTENANCE

ISSUES (AND WHY THEY’RE A REAL
PROBLEM
Regardless of industry or discipline, we can probably all agree that routine maintenance —
sometimes referred to as preventative, predictive, or even scheduled maintenance — is a good
thing. Unfortunately, through the years I’ve found that most companies don’t have the robust
strategies they need.

Typical issues and the kinds of trouble they can create:

 1. Lack of structure and schedule
In many cases, routine tasks are just entries on a to-do list of work that needs to be performed —
with nothing within the work pack to drive compliance. In particular, a list of tasks beginning with
“Check” which have no guidance of an acceptable limit can have limited value. The result can be a
“tick and flick” style routine maintenance program that fails to identify impending failure warning
conditions.

2. Similar assets, similar duty, different strategies

Oftentimes, maintenance views each piece of equipment as a standalone object, with its own unique
maintenance strategy. As a result, one organization could have dozens of maintenance strategies to
manage, eating up time and resources. In extreme cases, this can lead to similar assets having
completely different recorded failure mechanisms and routine tasks, worded differently, grouped
differently and structured differently within the CMMS.

3. Operational focus
Operations might be reluctant to take equipment out of service for maintenance, so they delay or
even cancel the appropriate scheduled maintenance. At times this decision is driven by the thought
that the repair activity is the same in a planned or reactive manner. But experience tells us that
without maintenance, the risk is even longer downtime and more expensive repairs when something
fails.

4. Reactive routines
Sometimes, when an organization has been burned in the past by a preventable failure, they
overcompensate by performing maintenance tasks more often than necessary. The problem is, the
team might be wasting time doing unnecessary work — worse still it might even increase the
likelihood of future problems, simply because unnecessary intrusive maintenance can increase the
risk of failure.

5. Over-reliance on past experience

There’s no substitute for direct experience and expertise. But when tasks and frequencies are too
solely based on opinions and “what we’ve always done” — rather than sound assumptions —
maintenance teams can run into trouble through either over or under maintaining. Without
documented assumptions, business decisions are based on little more than a hunch. “Doing what
we’ve always done” might not be the right approach for the current equipment, with the current duty,
in the current business environment (and it certainly makes future review difficult).

6. Failure to address infrequent but high consequence failures

Naturally, routine tasks account for the most common failure modes. They should however also
address failures that happen less frequently, but may have a significant impact on the business.
Developing a maintenance plan which addresses both types, prevents unnecessary risk. For
example, a bearing may be set up on a lubrication schedule, but if there’s no plan to detect
performance degradations due to a lubrication deficiency, misalignment, material defect, etc then
undetected high consequence failures can occur.

7. Inadequate task instructions

Developing maintenance guidelines and best practices takes time and effort. Yet, all too often, the
maintenance organization fails to capture all that hard-won knowledge by creating clear, detailed
instructions. Instead, they fall back on the maintenance person’s knowledge — only to lose it when a
person leaves the team. Over time, incomplete instructions can lead to poorly executed, “bandaid-
style” tasks that get worse as the months go by.

8. Assuming new equipment will operate without failure for a period of time
There’s a unique situation that often occurs when new equipment is brought online. Maintenance
teams assume they have to operate the new equipment first to see how it fails before they can
identify and create the appropriate maintenance tasks. It’s easy to overlook the fact that they likely
have similar equipment with similar points of failure. Their data from related equipment provides a
basic foundation for constructing effective routine maintenance.

9. Missing opportunity to improve

If completed tasks aren’t reviewed regularly to gather feedback on instructions, tools needed, spare
parts needed, and frequency; the maintenance process never gets better. The quality or
effectiveness of the tasks then degrade over time and, with it, so does the equipment.

10. Doing what we can and not what we should

Too often, maintenance teams decide which tasks to perform based on their present skill sets —
rather than equipment requirements. Technical competency gaps can be addressed with a training
plan and/or new hires, as necessary, but the tasks should be driven by what the equipment needs.

Without a robust routine maintenance plan, you’re nearly always in reactive mode — conducting ad-
hoc maintenance that takes more time, uses more resources, and could incur more downtime than
simply taking care of things more proactively. What’s worse, it’s a vicious cycle. The more time
maintenance personnel spend fighting fires, the more their morale, productivity, and budget erodes.
The less effective routine work that is performed, the more equipment uptime and business
profitability suffer. At a certain point, it takes a herculean effort simply to regain stability and prevent
further performance declines.

Here’s the good news: An optimized maintenance strategy, constructed with the right structure is
simpler and easier to sustain. By fine-tuning your approach, you make sure your team is executing
the right number and type of maintenance tasks, at the right intervals, in the right way, using an
appropriate amount of resources and spare parts. And with a framework for continuous
improvement, you can ultimately drive towards higher reliability, availability and more efficient use of
your production equipment.