What is Maintenance Management ?

 

What is Maintenance Management:

Most of us confuse controlling maintenance activities with maintenance management – although both are essential functions to the maintenance organization, the difference is subtle and stark – if one is about dictating, the other characterizes the process of leading and directing the maintenance organization.

Maintenance Management has become a dire need for maintenance organizations with the rapidly growing technology and increasing trend of automation in many processes. For maintenance managers, management is about efficiently planning maintenance activities before an asset’s breakdown occurs, controlling time, cost, and resources in a manner that maximum efficiency can be yielded.

In maintenance, management is an act of determining the maintenance objective, strategies, and responsibilities and implementing them by employing planning, controlling, and supervision. It is an orderly set of activities that are required to preserve the equipment’s inherent capabilities in the most optimum way.

Benefits of Maintenance Management:

Adapting the process of Maintenance Management gives some excellent maintenance benefits.

• It reduces the overall cost of maintenance activities.
• Effective maintenance management process increases the equipment reliability by assuring timely preventive maintenance of the asset
• Maintenance Management improves factory production by effective utilization of the company’s resources.
• Equipment unscheduled downtimes are reduced – thence increasing customer service.
• Maintenance Management improves safety by controlling the number of safety and environmental incidents.
• A well-managed plant can control its maintenance cost and can predict the next year’s budget.
• Preserving equipment through effective implementation of maintenance strategies and policies increases equipment lifespan.
• Management in maintenance improves the working environment of the organization by keeping equipment maintained and safe - a positive impact on employees’ health.
• Maintenance Management is a great way to reduce the process variations – it improves the product and maintenance quality.

Key Elements of Maintenance Management:

Maintenance Management is not a one-time effort, but the improvement is an ongoing process that requires consistency and rigorous follow-up on the implementation of key elements of process management.

1-      Maintenance Policy:

For the effective implementation of Maintenance Management, organizations need to ensure that their maintenance policy is well established and understood by all employees. The Maintenance Policy manual must include all maintenance objectives, responsibilities, and measuring indices concisely and comprehensively.

2-      Material Management:

Exercising material control is one of the crucial elements of an effective maintenance management program as material mismanagement leads to many problems such as increased Mean time to repair (MMTR) and increase the frequency of material stock-outs. Steps like job planning, scheduling, well coordinating and purchasing, and reviewing the completed jobs are essential in the process of ensuring maintenance management.

3-      Work Order System:

The work order system is another key element that enables organizations to manage and control maintenance activities as desired or apropos job priorities. The work order system is an efficient way of optimizing material cost and is also valuable in the effective utilization of resources by ensuring the right skills and tools for the job.  Owing to get excellent results in maintenance management, the work order should contain a well-written description of the work, the planned date for its resolution, details of the material that will be used in the rectification, work category if its corrective or preventive, man hours and the accumulated cost of man and material, etc.

 4-      Equipment Record:

One of the important steps in the process of effective maintenance management is to ensure that the equipment maintenance, cost, and inventory record are thoroughly documented and well maintained. The equipment record shall include the following information such as:

• The complete record of the maintenance work performed on the equipment.
• Total maintenance cost that occurred on it throughout its life cycle – this contains the total man hours involved and the material cost up to date.
• Type of maintenance shall also be a part of the document – maintenance type such as Preventive, Corrective planned, corrective unplanned, etc.
• Inventory category shall account for the equipment’s primary detail such as; make, type, property number, sizes, date of installation, date of manufacturing, location of the equipment, procurement cost, etc.
• File section of the equipment record contains the operating manual, drawings, warranties, spare part list, FMEA document, etc.

5- Preventive & Corrective Maintenance:

Maintenance Management ensures that all equipment undergoes some kind of maintenance on yearly basis – it can be preventive, planned corrective, or can be conditioned based. The maintenance Manager is responsible to keep the company’s equipment in satisfactory condition by means of regular inspection and planning a preventive maintenance program.  Ensuring effective implementation of preventive and corrective maintenance increases equipment reliability, optimizes maintenance cost, and ensures compliance with all the maintenance procedures and standards.

6-      Planning & Scheduling:

Job planning in managing maintenance activities is the most important thing to start with – it makes sure that every work that requires to be done should go through the planning procedure which involves work prioritizing, tool, parts and materials arrangement, delivery of the tools and parts to the planned location identification and sequencing of the work, estimated time in which work can be completed, coordination from operation department, etc.

7-      Backlog Control & Priority System:

Maintenance backlog is another key element in the process of managing maintenance activities. Backlog in the maintenance department balances the workload and manpower. It also helps in classifying and prioritizing the work owing to prevent equipment from functional failure. A backlog of 4 to 5 weeks is considered an industry benchmark which is essential for the organization to keep doing work proactively.

A disciplined method of job prioritizing is crucial for the maintenance organization in order to manage the maintenance backlog effectively. Job prioritizing helps in deciding that the most critical work is done on priority and the decision is made after evaluating the criticality of the asset and how it impacts the overall operation.

8-      Performance Measurement & Reporting:

Owing to having a continuous improvement in the maintenance organization, management needs to pay heed to its reporting and its key performance indicators. Measuring indices are an efficient way of analyzing the overall performance of the plant, identifying the areas of improvement, developing plans for future maintenance, and so on. 

Maintenance Management is indeed important for organizational growth and a vital source of making money in the business. Maintenance managers who focus too much on exercising control need to look beyond it and start thinking about process management. Though it doesn’t mean that controlling maintenance activities is not needed at all – controlling processes is necessary for ensuring safety and process variations. Maintenance Management allows managers to deduce valuable insights from the maintenance record and measuring indices and formulate strategies to get a profitable return.