7 Effective Strategies to initiate Proactive Maintenance Culture for

Companies that use Spreadsheets

A recent (May 2017) article by Deloitte suggests that 5 to 20% of overall

plant production capacity is influenced by its maintenance strategy. This is
yet another proof point that maintenance should be a mainstream activity
regardless of the size of the companies.
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Quite often organisations are focused on ‘here and now’ aspect of their
business and adopt Run-to-failure or reactive maintenance as their key
maintenance attitude.
However, many companies are unaware that proactive maintenance can
enable companies to reduce their maintenance bills by up to 70%.
This article is for teams who are just starting out on their maintenance
journey - It will give you a framework on how to move from reactive to
proactive maintenance.
To set a reading benchmark, when talking about reducing reactive
maintenance, we are referring to any maintenance activity considered as an
emergency, thus requiring immediate attention.
Let’s take a look at how you can move from reactive to proactive
maintenance;
#1 Make Maintenance Part of Your Business by Creating a Maintenance
team. By the right team, we mean a group of people dedicated to
guaranteeing RAMS (Reliability, Availability, Maintainability and Safety). This
team should be formed by qualified and well-trained engineers and
technicians able to properly use the asset management system, and ready
to conduct failure analysis, root cause analysis and FMEA (Failure Modes and
Effects Analysis), among other required activities according to the case.
#2 Design Effective Preventive and Predictive maintenance frameworks that
augment your workflows. Establishing a PM and a PdM program is definitely
a must to reduce reactive maintenance. Applying reliability centered
maintenance analysis would be ideal; however, starting with the information
from the manuals in the original equipment manufacturer and the
experience of the team to create and establish the PM and PdM programs
are a good starting points. The focus must be on early detection of possible
failures, which is why condition monitoring technologies should be made
available and should be used. To ensure these tasks are performed properly,
some members of the team should be certified in some of the predictive
maintenance most common techniques, such as vibration analysis, oil
analysis and infrared thermography.
#3 Planning and Scheduling has a direct effect on Maintenance
Framework. All the work must be well planned and scheduled. This will
provide a complete step-by-step process with proper safety precautions,
thus keeping workers informed, organised and safe. Some of the things the
planner should keep on is a plan library, backlog management, data
accuracy, among others.
#4 Formalise weekly schedule. Most of the planned work should be
delegated to operators, maintainers, and to health, safety and environment
personnel. This is possible by showing the weekly activities they must
perform in a matrix type schedule. It is also suggested to consider creating
a reactive only maintenance team to ensure reactive and proactive
activities do not cross priorities. However, careful attention must be given to
the fact that the reactive maintenance team should not perform low priority
unscheduled activities, but only high priority reactive activities.
#5 Undertake Root Cause Analysis (RCA) and Failure Modes and Effects
Analysis (FMEA). RCA analysis of critical events helps you to know whether
the event was triggered due to manufacturing, operating or maintenance
parameters. FMEA analysis is a systematic approach to understand when
and where your assets may fail as well understand the impact of the likely
failure. (If you deploy predictive analysis tools this is an automated process).
#6 Analyse Reactive Work Consistently. Reactive work cannot be fully
eliminated and it is the most expensive maintenance activity, so the
solution is to optimise its use. Tracking percentage of reactive work
undertaken on a weekly/monthly basis acts as a mechanism to optimise it.
#7 Build valuable data. Even if you are using Spreadsheet, start to collect
data about maintenance framework. As a starting point, prepare a list of
faulty or damaged equipment. Record your maintenance tasks, notes from
technicians, work schedules, checkups etc. Build your maintenance data so
that you can correlate maintenance events. For example; you can create
time-based, production-based and operating conditions-based correlations.
Long-term data also compliments your confidence in your maintenance
strategy
A modular approach of the above steps is highly recommended. Forming a
team will almost take care of the rest of the steps. If you cannot assign a
dedicated team, start with assigning time to maintenance. 5 to 20% of your
operating costs can be saved with your maintenance strategy so even if you
start with a plan it should (in theory) enable you to reduce your plant
operating costs.
Article written for Maintworld-magazine by Prasanna Kulkarni, Founder
and Product Architect of Comparesoft. Comparesoft is an AI-driven asset
management software recommender used by Honda, GE, Siemens and
thousands of other businesses.