Does Your Maintenance Function Need Help?
Posted: Friday, May 28, 2004
by Larry Bush
Maintenance Policy Initiative
Are unplanned shutdowns causing your company unacceptable productivity losses?
Do you wish you had control over every facet of your maintenance department?
Are you a Plant Manager looking for a way to help your maintenance manager?
Are you a maintenance supervisor expecting more back up from management?
Maintenance Policy and Procedures Manual has "answers" and shows you:
- How to set up and run your maintenance department in today’s fast-paced and highly competitive business environment.
- How to implement the four objectives every maintenance department must aim for.
- How to manage the 13 functions of a maintenance department.
- How to start and run a complete maintenance work order and call order system.
- How to make your Preventive and Predictive Maintenance Plans work.
When was the last time you had a breakdown or unplanned shutdown in the middle of a production run due to a maintenance problem? MP & P Manual can help you make those maintenance problems a rarity instead of a certainty.
I don’t mean to imply that your maintenance work will be any less than it is now, only that the workload will be in a different direction than "breakdown" maintenance. A good preventive and predictive maintenance plan as part of total production maintenance will increase productivity and reduce maintenance costs.
By organizing and documenting maintenance work and parts usage, you will be able to see exactly where your department is, in what direction it’s headed, and how much it’s costing you to get there.
Some organizations believe that if they don’t document maintenance work and then spread maintenance costs around to Production units that maintenance costs are somehow lower than if everything was documented. Studies of operating facilities and maintenance departments before and after organizational improvements and documentation have clearly demonstrated the true cost of an unorganized maintenance function and the need for improvement.
Maintenance work documentation must include call order work maintenance work orders parts ordering, issuing and stocking time spent planning work time spent redoing work not planned and time spent by production on planning maintenance work.
When calculating true maintenance costs, all those things must be considered as well as parts and material costs emergency ordering costs wrong parts and material costs production down time lost wages distribution costs loss of business costs due to downtime and losses to physical plant assets due to inadequate maintenance.
Overstaffing and/or understaffing is another area that must be taken into consideration. When maintenance workload is scattered out to Production units concerned with having maintenance personnel on hand at all times to keep the equipment running, overstaffing frequently occurs. Just as frequently, under-staffing can also occur if the equipment is running well but under-maintained.
Maintenance overstaffing can be prevalent in production areas while under-staffing can occur in areas just as critical as production but not as powerful, such as facilities, maintenance supervision, and maintenance planning.
Understaffing can also occur in production areas. Overall numbers of main-tenance personnel can exceed overall maintenance requirements. Breakdowns can occur in several areas simultaneously, and due to the distribution of per-sonnel, extended shutdowns can be recorded in one area while maintenance personnel in another area are underutilized.
Inadequacy in the areas of documentation of equipment, work, and procedures trained personnel or planning, will result in a decrease in protection and upkeep of facility assets and a corresponding decrease in value and usefulness of facility assets. Production is not at optimum levels under these conditions.
In order to understand and effectively manage the maintenance requirements of a manufacturing plant, facility, or building complex, you must have a sufficient amount of documentation of the facility and equipment. In addition, you must have a sufficient number of trained personnel carrying out a plan for the optimum protection and upkeep of facility assets.
Author: Larry Bush
Company: Maintenance Policy Initiative
Website: www.reliability-consultant.com
This Article has been viewed 2,324 times. (Not updated in real-time.)
No comments yet.We want your comments! If you can read this, you don't have javascript enabled, so you can't use this comment system. Please enable javascript.