When most people start manufacturing facilities, the primary goals include achieving high productivity, building strong brands, and optimizing profitability. To achieve these goals, you need to ensure that the equipment and all facilities are always in top condition, and one way of doing that is through preventive maintenance. Here is a closer look at preventive maintenance to demonstrate what it is, how it works, and the main advantages.
How Does Preventive Maintenance Work?
Preventive maintenance is the care and servicing of industrial equipment to ensure they are maintained in top condition via systematic observation and inspections to detect and address faults before breakdowns. Here are the main advantages of using preventive maintenance:
- Enhanced safety.
- Longer equipment lifespan.
- Increased productivity.
- Reduced production costs.
- Lower maintenance costs.
- Less energy consumption.
How to Create a Good Preventive Maintenance Programs
To use preventive maintenance, you need an elaborate program that signals your team when the performance of a machinery or equipment falls below the expected targets. Here are the main steps to creating a good preventive maintenance program:
Develop a Preventive Maintenance plan
A good preventive maintenance plan is designed to guarantee the good performance of industrial systems by preventing failure and enhancing the production cycle. To develop a good plan, it is important to factor in things such as the objectives, production targets, and intervention inventory. Make sure to also identify those who will be in charge of the project.
You also need to craft a Failure Mode, Effects, and Criticality Analysis (FMECA) to make it possible to determine the criticality level of equipment depending on their functions. All the maintenance operations in your plan should fulfill these requirements:
- Efficiency.
- Applicability.
- Profitability.
Develop an Inventory of Your Facility Equipment
Although time-consuming, developing your facility’s equipment inventory is one of the most important things when developing a preventive maintenance program. So, start by walking through your facility to make an inventory of the relevant equipment.
In addition to capturing the types of equipment in your facility, you also need the make, serial numbers, specifications, and fixed locations. The more info you can gather about the equipment, the better. Make sure to also determine the condition of the selected equipment.
Adopt the Best Preventive Maintenance Procedures
This step involves determining the tasks that are required to maintain your industrial facility equipment in top condition. For example, what is the required frequency of maintaining the equipment? Is it weekly, monthly, or annually? Depending on the nature of your industrial facility, you might select a maintenance model scheduled around run-time hours or using meter-based triggers.
Create Preventive Maintenance Schedule Priorities
Because preventive maintenance can take time, energy, and a lot of resources, it is important to focus on priority machinery. Indeed, you should note the maintenance priorities when creating your equipment inventory. When it is time to maintain your facility, start with the priority equipment and then extend to non-priority equipment.
Iskander Makhmudov’s Companies: Preventive Maintenance Programs in Action at UMMC
After forming Ural Mining and Metallurgical Company (UMMC), Iskander Makhmudovput a lot of effort into maintenance to improve the company’s efficiency. Good preventive maintenance is one of the primary reasons for high efficiency reported at UMMC. In addition to using some of the best equipment in the mining industry, he also invested in regular training to equip staff with skills that help them easily note issues and have them addressed on time.
To increase and sustain high productivity of your industrial facility, it is crucial to maintain it in top condition. Using a good preventive maintenance program, it becomes easy to note issues and address them before they can result in disasters or downtimes. To be more successful in industrial operations, it would also be a good idea to learn from top industrialists, such as Iskander Makhmudov.
