Maintenance Strategies

When failure occurs, it costs the organisation money

in form of costs incurred on repairing the failure or
costs due to safety or costs due to lost of production.
That determines the existence of maintenance
department in the organisation(s).
In order to manage these processes properly there
should be maintenance strategies should be applied.
The effects of failures are negative in an organisation
Types of maintenance strategies
 Design out strategy:
This is not really a pure maintenance strategy but is listed as
such because it is used extensively by maintenance engineers.
The objective is to redesign the particular system or
component to decrease the need for maintenance by
removing unwanted failure modes.
 Preventive Maintenance/ Time driven / Interval based
All maintenance strategies aimed at preventing failure from
occurring are of the class Preventive Maintenance. The
traditional way of preventing failure from occurring is by
replacing or reconditioning the item (sub-system or
component) before failure occurs. The types of preventive
maintenance are as follows:
Some of the main objectives of PM

 To enhance capital equipment productive life,

 reduce critical equipment breakdowns,
 allow better planning
 scheduling of needed maintenance work,
 minimize production losses due to equipment
failures
 promote health and safety of maintenance
personnel
PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE ELEMENTS
 Inspection
 Servicing
 Calibration
 Testing
 Alignment
 Adjustment
 Installation
 TYPES OF PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE STRATEGIES

Age based maintenance:

maintenance actions are undertaken regularly based on the
age of the equipment. Examples are scheduled maintenance
work based on machine running hours, tonnage handled,
production throughput and kilometers travelled.
Calendar based maintenance :
These tasks can be classified into of the following broad
classes:
 Scheduled overhaul -the machine or component is
completely stripped and reconditioned to as near as the
good-as-new condition as is possible
 Scheduled replacement
the item (sub-assembly or component) is discarded and
replaced
 Routine services
the plant/machine receives a service during which routine
checks are made, oils and filters changed, greasing done and
adjustments made.
 Special categories of used based maintenance
 Block replacement:
similar components should have similar failure frequencies.
 Opportunistic maintenance:
tasks will be done only when the plant is down.
Predictive (Condition Based) Maintenance
The condition of the equipment/component is measured at
predetermined intervals, so to determine when the
component will fail. Only then will a replacement/overhaul be
scheduled.
Two main types of condition-based maintenance can be identified:
 Inspection
use is made of the five senses of a person (engineer, foreman,
artisan) to determine the condition of the equipment or
component. This can include the use of instruments that enhances
the use of the senses through amplification or benchmarking.
 Condition monitoring
some parameter is monitored to detect signs of imminent failure.
Examples of these are: (see attachment 1 for details of these)
PREDICTIVE TECHNOLOGIES
Vibration, Thermography , Electrical condition monitoring,
Lubricant and wear particle analysis, Passive (airborne) ultrasonics,
Nondestructive testing,
 Corrective (Failure) Maintenance
This is a strategy of 'do nothing' or 'wait for failure'. It entails
not trying to determine when the component will fail
(condition monitoring or inspection) or doing anything to
prevent the failure from occurring (use based). This is used
when no other strategy can be applied with better end
results. Corrective maintenance can be further classified into
the following three classes:
 Replacement
this will be the strategy if the decision was to totally replace
the component or unit upon failure.
 Repair
this will be the strategy if the decision was to repair the
component or unit upon failure.
 Delayed decision
this will be the strategy if the decision was to
either totally replace the component or unit upon
failure or to repair it.
FIVE CATAGORIES OF CORRECTIVE MAINTENANCE
 Fail-repair
 Salvage
 Rebuild
 Overhaul
• Servicing
• Pro-active Maintenance
• Pro-active maintenance is a philosophy that
spans the whole of the maintenance strategy
structure as shown above. Instead of using
information gained from monitoring (or other
means) to predict when a failure will occur, the
same information is used to eradicate failure
completely. Pro-active action is taken to
completely remove the root cause of failure. To
implement such a method, the correct
instrumentation must be available to facilitate the
necessary measurements being taken. Design-
out plays a major role in Pro-active
Maintenance.