Preventive Maintenance (PM) assumes that a product has components that wear and must be replaced on a continual basis. This analysis will calculate how often these products should be replaced and tie it back into the maintainability analysis to determine the overall cost of maintaining the product in the field.
These services can be closely tied to the Failure Modes, Effects and Criticality Analysis (FMECA) service or they can be performed independent of the FMECA.
Preventive maintenance analysis program results will carry to the bottom-line in the form of:
- Reductions in the total cost of maintenance
- Fewer urgent and emergency interruptions to operations due to equipment breakdowns
- Level workloads and a stabilized work force
- Reductions in the total labor needed to maintain facilities in the required condition
- Controlled reductions in the inventory of materials and spare parts
- Increases in the volume of work that can be planned and scheduled repetitively, and a decrease in high priority, randomly occurring and unscheduled work
- Reduced unnecessary damage to equipment
Indicators of Ineffective PM analysis
- Low equipment utilization due to unscheduled stoppages
- High wait or idle time for machine operators during outages
- High scrap and rejects indicative of quality problems
- Higher than normal repair costs due to neglect of proper lubrication, inspections or service.
- Decrease in the expected life of capital investments due to inadequate maintenance
Effective PM analysis needs
- Top management understanding of the true cost of poor maintenance, which is several times initial estimate
- Sustained management leadership and absolute commitment
- Knowledge of equipment/process conditions required to yield quality, output, safety, and compliance standards
- PPM and other programmed maintenance must be a normal part of schedule and capacity determination. Management must in sure that PM is never delayed.
- Dedicated staffing is preferable
- Operator should participate in daily machine checks
- Efficient PPM routes
- Effective PM checklists defining program required limits of equipment condition
- Adequate Equipment Records and Equipment Histories
- Three phases
- Detection—the key element
- Analysis—defines the specific problem from which the symptom originates
- Correction—the return of the PPM investment
