Maintenance Management

For plants, manufacturers, and equipment hubs, maintenance management is a crucial part of a successful business. If an essential piece of equipment, like a wind turbine at a wind farm, breaks down, the costs could be astronomical. Not only does equipment downtime result in lost time, but lost profits as well.

A better strategy is being proactive instead of reactive. Rather than waiting until something breaks down to make a repair, staying on top of routine maintenance helps to prevent downtime and the costs associated with it. Maintenance management plays a key role in this strategy by monitoring assets to ensure they are working effectively and efficiently. By ensuring optimal asset performance through maintenance management, enterprises can rest assured that their equipment is giving them maximum return on investment.

Increase productivity and profit

The goal of maintenance management is to minimize downtime and repairs in order to maximize productivity and revenue. Increased efficiency leads to increased profits; therefore, effective maintenance management is a crucial aspect of any smart manufacturing enterprise.

Maintenance management helps improve all aspects of the maintenance process, allowing for a more organized experience. Improved organization generates improved results, and successful maintenance management ensures that maintenance tasks flow smoothly to improve an organization’s everyday operations and create a smart manufacturing enterprise.

The importance of maintenance management

Industrial enterprises rely on efficient operation, and maintenance management helps manufacturers stay on track with production. By effectively managing all aspects of maintenance operations, enterprises can enjoy a more organized, streamlined, and cost-effective process.

However, increased efficiency isn’t the only benefit of maintenance management. Effectively managing maintenance processes and procedures helps extend equipment lifecycle so that enterprises can reap maximum return on investment. By staying on top of maintenance management activities such as regular repairs and maintenance tasks, companies can enjoy the benefits of reliable equipment without making enormous purchases of all-new assets.

Furthermore, this process helps ensure a safer work environment and smart manufacturing enterprise. By staying on schedule with regular maintenance and repairs, organizations can have full confidence in meeting essential safety regulations and protecting their employees in the workplace.

Finally, successful maintenance management results in a better end product. Through improved productivity and reliability, enterprises can count on delivering higher quality results to their customers.

Elements of maintenance management

Maintenance management consists of a few key components, including:

• Asset lifecycle management focuses on managing and monitoring assets throughout their lifecycle. By tracking the performance of assets over time, maintenance management teams can make important decisions on equipment lifecycle, such as whether it makes sense to repair an asset or replace it altogether.
  
  
• Maintenance scheduling and planning involves planning for and scheduling necessary maintenance. Ensuring all maintenance tasks have an assigned work crew and timeline helps companies better anticipate any downtime and make plans accordingly.
  
  
• Facility management involves securing resources to ensure the actual facility stays up and running. This crucial task includes maintaining electrical systems, plumbing, HVAC systems, and internet to ensure day-to-day operations can actually take place.
  
  
• Work order management is a key aspect of the maintenance management process and oversees the creation, progress, and closure of work orders. Because work orders communicate the need for and status of maintenance work, work order management is of the utmost importance.
  
  
• Maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) inventory management involves tracking, acquiring, and storing inventory of key items such as PPE, safety gear, cleaning supplies, and similar items. This ensures team members always have access to what they need when they need it.
  
  
• Reporting allows enterprises to see firsthand just how well their assets are performing in order to make better business decisions and plans down the line.

Implementing maintenance management

There are several tools that can help enterprises incorporate maintenance management into their business models. CMMS software, which helps centralize and streamline the maintenance management process, is perhaps the most powerful tool on the market. CMMS maintenance software is one component of enterprise asset management, which ultimately helps enterprises preserve their assets in order to increase performance and equipment lifecycle.

FAQs

What is maintenance management?
Maintenance management is a process that oversees equipment status and the maintenance and repair processes in order to prevent equipment downtime. Ensuring that equipment stays in working order helps improve efficiency and lower unnecessary repair costs, as well as costs associated with downtime.

What are the objectives of maintenance management?
The primary goal of maintenance management is to ensure assets stay up and running in order to prevent unnecessary maintenance and repair costs. In turn, this helps to maintain efficiency, productivity, and profitability, and extend equipment lifecycle.

What are the four types of maintenance?
The four types of maintenance include corrective maintenance (also known as “firefighter”), preventive maintenance, risk-based maintenance, and condition-based maintenance. Corrective maintenance involves taking action to repair an asset when it breaks down. Because of this strategy, corrective maintenance is also called “firefighter” maintenance because it takes a reactive as opposed to a proactive approach to maintenance. 

Conversely, preventive maintenance aims to prevent major repairs by incorporating ongoing maintenance into an enterprise’s asset lifecycle management strategy. By making occasional minor repairs to assets, preventive maintenance in theory reduces the likelihood of assets requiring any sort of difficult and time-consuming repairs.  

Risk-based maintenance gives priority to maintaining and repairing assets that have the most devastating consequences if they fail. This maintenance philosophy believes that by devoting time and resources to maintaining volatile assets, enterprises can minimize the risk of downtime and the associated consequences.  

Finally, condition-based maintenance involves collecting data on an asset’s performance in order to monitor its condition and make maintenance decisions accordingly. Data is gathered through sensors that track an asset’s performance and alert maintenance teams of any dips or red flags.