Benefits of Maintenance.

 Benefits of Maintenance

They say investment in [effective] maintenance leads to reliable plant capacity and poor maintenance means poor revenue stream. The purpose of maintenance is to ensure that all equipment/assets are operating at 100% efficiency at all times and don’t fail prematurely so that they keep producing and providing service as intended.

An effective Maintenance program has many ultimate benefits in terms of sustaining and improving plant capacity and reducing overall facility costs by:

1. Reducing production downtime.
2. Increasing life expectancy of assets, thereby eliminating premature replacement of assets.
3. Reducing overtime costs and providing more economical use of maintenance personnel due to working on a scheduled basis, rather than unscheduled basis, or repair failures.
4. Reducing the cost of repairs by reducing secondary failures, because when any part or component fails in service, they usually damage other parts and become the cause of total asset failure.
5. Reducing rejects, reworks, and scrap due to better overall asset condition.
6. Improving safety and quality condition.

Keeping the purpose of maintenance in mind, a structured maintenance program is an optimum approach to improve asset performance and at the same time contain and even reduce the cost of maintenance. The basic approach to maintenance is to be grouped into categories: condition-based maintenance, Preventive Maintenance, Risk-Based Maintenance, Corrective Maintenance, Proactive Maintenance, and Operator Based Maintenance. 

Quality Issues in Maintenance:

Assets fail due to mainly two reasons: poor design and human error. Negligence, attitude, and ignorance are the prime factors of human errors. Several studies have indicated that over 70% of failures are caused by human errors such as inadequate design, overloading, making operational errors, ignoring failure symptoms, having untrained or unqualified operators or maintenance personnel, and not operating an asset when needed.

There is another data revealed that 55% of the cases, unplanned maintenance outages were caused by a human error committed during maintenance outages. All maintenance work involves some risk – risk of inducing defects of various kinds while performing the maintenance activities. Most of the time failure occurs on equipment right after maintenance. Typically, the following errors may occur during PM (Preventive Maintenance) and other types of maintenance work. 

1. Damage during the inspection, repair adjustment, or installation of a replacement part.
2. Installation of a material or a part that is defective.
3. Incorrect installation of a replacement part or incorrect assembly.
4. Reintroduction of infant mortality by installing new parts that have not been tested.
5. Damage to an adjacent asset or component during a maintenance task.
6. Damage due to over-torque and over-lubrication.
7. Due to incorrect or loose wiring or sometimes error occurs due to over-tightness of wiring during maintenance tasks.
8. Damage due to ignoring or overlooking failure symptoms.

The aforementioned failures that are caused by human errors can be reduced to zero failures if all maintenance and operation personnel follow industry best practices, as well as strict adherence to the procedures. Total commitment is also needed from top management to supervisor, from operator to maintainer. The following measures are suggested to ensure a high-quality maintenance program that also motivates maintenance personnel:

1. Provide training in maintenance best practices and procedures for maintenance on specific assets.
2. Provide appropriate tools to perform tasks effectively.
3. Get personnel involved in performing FMEA and RCA and in developing maintenance procedures.
4. Follow up to assure quality performance.
5. Publicize and reduce costs with improved uptime, which is the result of effective maintenance practices.

Glossary:

Downtime:

Equipment downtime is the amount of time that equipment is not operating. Downtime can be planned for Preventive Maintenance or Predictive Maintenance etc. or it can be unplanned like an equipment failure due to a broken part.

Infant Mortality:

Infant mortality is those failures that occur prematurely because of inadequate design, inferior material, or improper installation. Infant mortality is a special equipment failure mode that shows the probability of failure being highest when the equipment is first started.

Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA):

A technique to examine an asset, process, or design to determine potential ways it can fail and the potential effects (consequences), and subsequently to identify appropriate mitigation tasks for highest priority risks.

Root Cause Analysis (RCA):

Identification and evaluation of the reason for an undesirable condition or nonconformance. A methodology that leads to the discovery of the cause of a problem, or root cause.

Uptime:

Uptime is a time during which an asset or system either is fully operational or is ready to perform its intended function. It is the opposite of downtime.