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.
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