Preventive Maintenance of Machinery in Manufacturing: Keeping the System Flowing with Software
If you’ve ever owned a car, you know the importance that maintenance has in keeping things rolling. With any machinery such as a car, it is a sort of “pay me now or pay me later” mentality where the idea of regular upkeep, ahead of any breakdowns, means that costly and time consuming downtime for repairs is hopefully prevented from occurring.
In other words, preventive maintenance is designed to: 1) predict the onset of machine or component failures; 2) detect failures before they have any significant impact on manufacturing operations; and 3) repair (or replace) the machine(s) or component(s) before the failure occurs.
Indeed, by scheduling the preventive maintenance of machinery on our terms and in our schedule, we can plan in advance for a short term downtime during the most convenient time available to us; that is, for a day or time when, perhaps, the asset is not even needed. To this end, timing of maintenance and the convenience of the timing in relation to present or pending jobs must be taken into account when scheduling machine maintenance, repairs, or replacement. In addition, to maximize the value that such preventive maintenance has, a balance must be made between over-maintaining and under-maintaining the machine.
These notions of “timing”, “convenience”, and “balance” are paramount considerations as they regard the concept of preventive maintenance in manufacturing. That is to say, shop floor machinery maintained on a timely and scheduled basis can keep the system flow going with little, if no loss of productivity. In this sense, we can say to be fitting preventive maintenance into the production schedule. Machinery downtime can be anticipated and worked into the schedule to avoid system flow interruption.
Maintenance timing can be associated with any number of predictable and convenient factors such as seasonal use, hours in production, and/or machine age and use history. With this said, however, all too often preventive maintenance is based upon factors that have little to do with any technically based decision. The result is maintenance that may be ineffective in detecting the potential onset of failure, or wastefully duplicating the efforts of other maintenance efforts.
In other words, properly timed preventive maintenance is structured in such a way that the routine is based upon actual technical considerations of each and every piece of machinery. A generalized “one size fits all” maintenance scheme is usually ineffective as it treats a diverse set of often complex machines as if they were made and used in the same way and frequency.
Finally, with timing and convenience taken into account, a balance must be achieved between too much and too little attention to maintenance. Under-maintenance is that maintenance which is done at overextended intervals or, unfortunately, not at all. The results are detrimental to manufacturing operations: frequent and/or long term breakdowns, lost production, lost output, and high levels of unplanned “catch-up” work.
On the other hand, over-maintenance means to perform preventive maintenance at intervals that too frequent and add no value to production output—in short, over-maintenance is usually wasteful duplication and therefore not cost-effective as it impacts both direct costs and profitability.
In conclusion, all factors of proper preventive maintenance—timing, convenience, balance—are achievable in today’s manufacturing environment through the use of a robust manufacturing software system. With such a system, machine maintenance histories are immediately available for maintenance supervisors, and any downtime associated with maintenance and/or repairs or new machinery installations is visible to both schedulers and operators via graphical screens and interfaces. It is this sort of routine and predictability that is at the heart of the preventive maintenance design.