You can just see the eyes of many maintenance managers in many small
companies glaze over at the mention of CMMS, RCM, TPM, FMEA and the other
maintenance related acronyms that are often introduced in discussions on
maintenance and facilities management. Big companies often employ some of
these initiatives in their maintenance organisations because they can afford
to do so. The reality for many cash-strapped, smaller businesses is quite
different. Most of their maintenance is reactive. Plant and equipment problems
only get dealt with as they arise and this is usually when it is too late
to avoid the resulting disruption to their production or processes.
Even when a company has both the will and the money to spend, it is difficult
to know where to start when considering the implementation of maintenance
management systems. Probably the majority of smaller companies are still
at this stage, which effectively means the majority of maintenance people.
The prospect of developing suitable maintenance control strategies and policies
from a standing start is daunting. There are many quest ions such as how
much will it cost , where will the resources come from and how will we cope?
Well, here's a surprise, the truth is that there is not really a lot to
it and I would suggest the following simplified, non-scientific approach.
I won’t show you any pie charts or fancy graphs and there will be no more
three letter acronyms but it is a realistic, effective plan and its low
cost puts it within the reach of all small companies.
Step one - Select a low - cost CMMS
This will involve spending some money because your CMMS, (Computerised Maintenance
Management System), with its equipment register will arguably be the most
important component in this process. The good news is that low cost, Access
based systems are now available from a couple of hundred pounds/ dollars
upwards. I f you have $1,000 or £600 to spend you should be able to find
a single user system that will more than meet your requirements. If you
need information on CMMS select ion you will find all you need to know on
the Internet. Just search for something like "CMMS" or "CMMS software selection"
and you will get many results.
Step two - Develop your equipment register
Maintaining an equipment register - a list of all of your maintainable equipment
- is a necessity. At the lowest level this may only hold details of your
equipment and its location but most CMMS applications provide space to store
all sorts of equipment details. These may include make, model, serial number,
equipment history, linked spares, linked drawings, etc. You can decide for
yourself what information you want to record. If you are lucky you may already
have this on a spreadsheet or database.
If you have lots of equipment you may want to consider developing a user
friendly asset numbering system. These are not hard to create, e.g. FAPACK03
could represent the final assembly area (FA), packaging machine (PACK) number
three. You can develop this to meet your needs.
Step three - develop your first Planned Maintenance (PM) schedule
Clearly PM schedules are best when they are based on equipment history but
you probably won't have any history available. If you don't have it your
past experience should be able to let you determine which equipment really
must be on your PM schedule. The initial schedule will therefore be based
on your familiarity with your own equipment but the PM frequencies that
you choose initially should be considered to be no more than an educated
guess. Where practical, you may also want to consider the use of metered
maintenance that is based on runtime or cycle time as opposed to a fixed
time period.
Step four - Put a good, ad hoc work reporting system in place
Maintenance can be broadly classified as planned or unplanned where unplanned
is breakdown or reactive work. Before a proper maintenance plan is in place
the ratio of unplanned maintenance versus planned maintenance will be high,
perhaps as much as 95% to 5% or even more. Your aim must be to reduce this
ratio to a more satisfactory level. To do this you must introduce an effective
work request system that captures the details of all ad hoc work that is
being done. One way to do this is to refuse to accept any work requests
unless they are formally requested through the CMMS. The details of these
jobs will then be captured and included in your equipment history.
Step five - Use the maintenance history to fine tune the Schedule
As time passes and equipment history starts to be collected in the CMMS
system you can use it to identify the equipment whose performance is causing
disruption and downtime. You can then optimise the PM work that is taking
place in an effort to minimise this. The CMMS must be capable of producing
the specific report s that can identify your improvement areas. For example,
if you are in a product ion environment and reduction of downtime is a problem
a downtime "top ten" report will be important.
Step six - Move from PM routines to planned inspections.
One of the dangers of introducing PM routines is that after some time it
can become generally accepted that they absolutely must be done within the
chosen period. This period was probably chosen by the guesstimate method
mentioned in step three above and it may not be the optimum interval. For
example a monthly maintenance routine can often be scheduled on plant or
machinery that may only have been used for a week or two during the previous
month. PM periodicity is therefore something that must be reviewed regularly.
You can use your developing equipment history to analyse the PM work that
is taking place and ask yourself what it is achieving. Look at the likely
failures that could occur on the equipment and try to put in place inspect
ion routines to monitor equipment condition
With more time, and a greater understanding of the problems that are occurring,
you should be able to drop many of your PM routines in favour of planned
maintenance inspections. These will give you an indication of when a routine
really needs to be carried out as opposed to doing it blindly, on a calendar
based basis.
The advantage of inspections is that many of them can be done quickly, while
the equipment is still running (subject of course to normal safety regulations.)
This is basic condition monitoring or condition based maintenance* and even
at this grass root s level it can be very effective. It can be further developed
with the use of low-cost, portable condition monitoring tools such as temperature
and vibration measuring equipment.
What does all this cost?
The above scenario is within the reach of almost all maintenance departments.
At this stage there is no need to throw money at the problem. You can do
it for as little as £1K but if you can afford £5K you could get yourself
a pretty useful CMMS system. All you really need is the time and the motivation.
If you do it right you will end up with more time on your hands for analysis
and predict ion of problems as opposed to reacting to them. If you follow
the above rules your returns will be much greater than your investment .
How long does all this take?
It cannot be done overnight. There is a significant amount of work involved
and it depends on the resources that you can allocate to it. That said,
a small company could put a CMMS in place in a couple of weeks and if you
already have an equipment register and maintenance procedures this will
make it easier. Gathering equipment history is a different story and it
will be a few months before you have any significant data available. One
year down the line you should be able to measure significant performance
improvements.
* Condition Monitoring (CM) - a maintenance process where the condition
of equipment is monitored for early signs of impending failure including
overheating and changes in vibration patterns. Equipment can be monitored
using sophisticated instrumentation or the human senses. Where instrumentation
is used actual limits can be imposed to trigger maintenance activity. Condition
Monitoring (CM), Predictive Maintenance (PdM) and Condition Based Maintenance
(CBM) are other terms used to describe this process.
(Definition by Bryan Weir of Perspective CMMS)
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