Most firms find it difficult to maintain effective spare parts management since there is a fear that stocking spares may not be in line with effectively controlling operating costs. As plant managers, various expectations to recognize ways to perform efficient spare parts management becomes important.
A marketing team needs a marketing manager. A retail store needs a store manager. A maintenance department needs a maintenance manager.
Whenever you have a team of people that needs to be coordinated, someone has to be in charge to delegate and oversee all of the activities. What makes the position of a maintenance manager a bit different is that the scope of their responsibilities is somewhat larger than with your standard managerial role.
If you had to guess 3 things people carry around at all times, what would it be? I bet you would say a wallet, keys, and a smartphone.
The fact that mobile devices have become, well, so mobile, is the reason why even the industrial sector is looking to take advantage of this powerful piece of machinery everyone has in their pocket.
Anyone who is serious about equipment maintenance is constantly on the lookout on how to improve it.
While predictive maintenance and other advanced techniques can certainly help, there is one simple thing that is right in front of your nose and that is rarely utilized to its full potential – an equipment maintenance log.
In this article, we will look at the benefits of having an accurate equipment maintenance log and discuss the best practices on how to keep it that way.
In today’s competitive climate, even small improvements can lead to significant benefits to your bottom line. That is especially evident in the manufacturing industry where shaving off a few seconds on one production process or reducing the number of defects for just 1% can bring in tens of thousands of dollars on a monthly basis.
One of the most common measurements used to optimize production is OEE (overall equipment effectiveness).
On this blog, we talked many times about the benefits of being proactive with your maintenance and how to make a switch from reactive to preventive maintenance.
Today, we will take a step back and have a hard look at corrective maintenance. We will discuss what is corrective maintenance, explore its relationship with reactive maintenance, show you how to efficiently incorporate corrective maintenance into your everyday workflow, and wrap things up with a few examples.
If someone was trying to convince you NOT to start a predictive maintenance program, they would probably tell you things like:
“It is just too expensive to implement; it is way too complicated; you don’t really need it…”
And while those might be valid concerns for some, they definitely aren’t stopping many organizations that are implementing it as we speak.
Preventative maintenance is a popular maintenance strategy because it brings a lot of benefits while, at the same time, isn’t particularly hard or expensive to implement.
That being said, preventive maintenance does have its downsides.
One of the most cited objections is that implementing it means you will be doing excessive maintenance. In other words, your technicians will spend time inspecting and maintaining assets that might not (yet) require that level of attention.
If we dig a little deeper, we will see that this leads to a bigger issue. When you are doing preventive work on an asset, in a lot of cases, that asset needs to be shut down first.
As nobody wants to shut down an asset during peak production times or for a maintenance work that doesn’t have to be done yet, let’s see how you can develop a maintenance schedule that takes into account those challenges and minimizes planned downtime.
As the fast-paced Fourth Industrial Revolution dawns, the effective maintenance and management of a facility are becoming increasingly important. Buildings are getting smarter, technology is getting more sophisticated, and this needs to be managed effectively to avoid business disruption and effectively leverage data insights. In fact, Navigant Research estimates that the smart building market will generate global revenue of USD$8.5 billion next year, up from $4.7 billion in 2016.
This is where having a dedicated facilities manager comes in. Facilities manager are generally responsible for ensuring everything to do with the physical infrastructure of the business is running as it should, as well as identifying areas for greater efficiency and cost-saving.
Over the last couple of years, you’ve probably seen terms like Industry 4.0, big data, machine learning, and Industry of Things jumping out from every other article.
But do you know what is their common denominator? For maintenance professionals, the one thing that connects all of it is predictive maintenance.