Manufacturing Preventive Maintenance

Maintenance management, to be truly effective should be very cost conscious. Benchmarking performance by measuring increased percentages of preventive versus repair activities, decreased mean time to repair, increased equipment reliability and reduced inventory levels are strengthened by incorporating the element of cost savings or cost containment achieved as well.

To be meaningful, the cost of providing maintenance services should reflect an accurate picture of maintenance costs by asso­ciating these costs with specific "cost entities" such as pieces of equipment, groups of equipment, facilities or areas within facili­ties. Measuring these costs can be further refined in a work order history for the entities by category showing a breakdown of labor, materials, overhead and subcontract costs by period and by year.

Utilizing routings, BOMs and an efficient work order process provides the basis for realizing an activity based costing approach in maintenance and a more accurate assessment of maintenance costs over time. Maintenance work orders should reflect a planned cost based on parts costs from the BOM and labor costs from the routing when the order is opened. As jobs progress, issues from stock and recording of time completions provide an accurate accumulation of actual costs.

As part of the compilation of maintenance history for equipment, facilities, and types of maintenance activities, the additional perspective of overall maintenance costs and breakdowns of costs into useful distributions helps to form a complete database for performance reporting. This will enable management to make informed decisions about future requirements and plans.

Central to effective maintenance management is the ability to develop realistic maintenance budgets, determine the appropriate mix of preventive, predictive and repair work for equipment, determine stock levels of critical, non-critical and consumable spares and assess craft requirement by maintenance job catego­ries. An integrated information system capable of providing timely and accurate data on equipment costs, resource utilization, material consumption, as well as performance and analysis infor­mation is necessary to support this type of decision making.

Application of the tools and techniques discussed here requires a computerized information system that provides on-line, real-time interactive information. The system should be accessible to users of all levels. Maintenance crews should be able to access equip­ment history information, parts availability and work order infor­mation; maintenance managers should be able to access timely, accurate plans and schedules, budgets and performance reports.

Some features that a fully interactive system should have are:

Back order tracking, work order tracking, time-phased material planning, time-phased usage tracking, job cost reporting--time, labor and materials, performance reporting, equipment history.

Ideally, the maintenance system should be integrated with plant inventory systems, production planning and control, condition monitoring devices, financial requirements, payroll and technical data bases. The system should provide for reporting capabilities on different levels including individual equipment, individual spare parts, assemblies, machines, labor, materials and individual and group performance.

Developing a strategy for maintenance management that empha­sizes prevention rather than reaction can eliminate waste. Employ­ing good management techniques like planning and scheduling the categories of the workload with emphasis on preventive mainte­nance makes the workload manageable. Using equipment BOMs to drive material requirements and routings to drive labor require­ments through the planning process eliminates the waste evi­denced in excessive inventory levels and under utilization of labor. And, using these tools to drive effective cost information provides management with the information needed to determine capital investment requirements, annual maintenance budgets and man­power levels and lays the foundation for future plans.

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