Managing productive maintenance E-Book

Harilaus Xenos

• Herausgeber: Falconi Editora
• Kategorie: Fachliteratur
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 343

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

Managing Productive Maintenance is a detailed guide to improve results through the implementation of best practices that eliminates equipment failures and maximizes the productivity of industrial assets. In this book, professionals of maintenance and production areas will find practical guidance and a simple approach to implement proven methods and techniques that unleash the full value in maintenance management activities in their organizations while bringing about unprecedented levels of operational reliability.

Leseprobe

Cataloguing Reference

X5g Xenos, Harilaus Georgius D’ Philippos.Managing productive maintenance: best practices to eliminate equipmentfailures and maximize productivity / Harilaus Georgius D’ PhilipposXenos – Nova Lima: FALCONI Editora, 2017.

292 p.: il., 17 × 24 cm

ISBN: 978-85-5556-022-4

1. Administration – Total Quality Management (TQM). 2. Maintenance

management. I. Title.

CDU: 658.562

Cover: Bruno Beraldo de Oliveira

Electronic publishing: Jeferson Teixeira Soares

English translation: Christopher J. Ficchi and Paula Serelle Macedo on behalf of Patacom Consultoria Linguística

Copyright © 2017 by HARILAUS GEORGIUS D´PHILIPPOS XENOS Commercial rights to this edition: FALCONI Editora Printed in Brazil

Acknowledgements

This book is the result of more than three years of studies and hands-on work done in dozens of companies. It contains invaluable knowledge acquired working in close collaboration with experts from Japan’s JUSE – Japanese Union of Scientists and Engineers and JODC – Japan Overseas Development Corporation. I would like to single out the fundamental role played by Mr. Akio Shiwaku, who, in this process, contributed enormously with his technical expertise and experience of more than thirty years in maintenance management at one of Japan’s largest steelmaking corporations. Mr. Shiwaku’s teachings and technical guidance, delivered with clarity and patience, were fundamental to the writing of this book. I am very grateful to Mr. Shiwaku for his collaboration over many years, and for his friendship.

A big thank you to the many dozens of people who have given Mr. Shiwaku and me access to their companies and factories, who worked with us with confidence and enthusiasm, engaged in discussions and offered their comments and suggestions.

Many thanks also to Prof. Vicente Falconi Campos and Prof. José Martins de Godoy, a couple of extraordinary people and dear friends who, over the years, have mentored and given me encouragement, support and guidance. They have moved and inspired me, and I have learned a great deal from them. They showed me new possibilities and opened doors for the development of my consulting expertise. Thank you for helping to create a vision for business excellence, and for your pioneer and influential work in implementing and revolutionizing management practices in countless organizations around the world.

Thanks to my fellow consultants and friends of the former Falconi’s maintenance management development group for their hard work in the research for the book and implementation of ideas, for their discussions about what we were learning together and for critiquing my thoughts and motivating me to keep going: Newton Moreira Leal, Daniel Cândido da Costa and Rogério Silva Nacif. Your collaborative work was remarkable! Thanks for providing feedback on the manuscript and making it so much better. In addition, thanks to Mr. Yoshiaki Matsuzaka for his diligent and precise interpretations and translations during our dozens of technical visits with Mr. Shiwaku to client companies.

Thanks to some great people and friends at Falconi Consulting: partners André Jeha, André Ribeiro Chaves, and executive director Viviane Martins for their support of my work and for paving the way for the English version of this book. Thanks to Jeferson Soares and Kelly Deus, and all the staff at Falconi Publishing for their hard work and professionalism in getting this book completed, and for advising along the way.

Thanks to the numerous executives and managers that I have worked with over the years, and who are amongst the finest people in the industry. Thanks for being constructively dissatisfied, for doing diligent and brave work inside their companies and plants to create disruption in the normal way of doing things, to break paradigms, and to facilitate the improvement process.

Thanks to those who I may have forgotten to acknowledge. Please accept my apologies, and my thanks to you too.

Finally, my biggest thanks to my parents Marília de Dirceu and Philippos Joannis Xenos, and to Fê, for all their love, patience, encouragement, and belief in me.

Summary

Acknowledgements

Preface

1 Overview of equipment maintenance

1.1 Introduction

1.2 Definition of maintenance

1.3 The scope of maintenance activities beyond just maintaining

1.4 Productive maintenance

1.4.1 Corrective maintenance

1.4.2 Preventive maintenance

1.4.3 Predictive maintenance – Condition-based interventions

1.4.4 Improvement of equipment

1.4.5 Maintenance prevention

1.4.6 Concept of operator care

1.4.7 What is the best method of equipment maintenance?

1.5 Maintenance support processes

1.6 Maintenance as the driver of manufacturing and business performance

1.7 A systems-view of maintenance management

1.8 Conclusions

2 The roadmap to create a productive maintenance transformation

2.1 Introduction

2.2 The focus and approach for productive maintenance

2.3 Put the house in order – start from the basics

2.4 Improve the processes that make maintenance effective

2.5 Conclusions

3 Understanding how equipment failures occur

3.1 Introduction

3.2 Definition of failure 

3.3 Why do failures occur? 

3.4 Failure models 

3.5 Do you trust the bathtub curve?

3.6 Root causes of failures 

3.6.1 Inadequate lubrication

3.6.2 Incorrect operation

3.6.3 Dirt, foreign objects and unfavorable environmental conditions 

3.6.4 Gaps and loose parts

3.7 Concept of potential failure

4 How to develop an effective failure-based root cause analysis

4.1 Introduction

4.2 The vicious cycle of reacting to failures – repair culture

4.3 Breaking free from the reaction cycle

4.3.1 Failure management system

4.4 Conclusions

5 Preventive actions: how to act effectively before failures occur

5.1 Introduction 

5.2 Principles of failure prevention 

5.2.1 Concept of preventive maintenance

5.2.2 Preventive actions based on time

5.2.3 Preventive actions based on the condition

5.3 We have preventive actions, but failures do not decrease! 

5.3.1 Preventive actions and factory floor

5.3.2 Sensitive inspections are important but insufficient

5.4 Making preventive actions more effective

5.4.1 How to select preventive actions 

5.4.2 How to optimize the frequency of preventive actions

5.5 Basics of maintenance prevention

5.5.1 Concept of life cycle cost

5.5.2 Practicing maintenance prevention

5.6 Conclusion

6 Planning and standardization of preventive actions

6.1 Introduction

6.2 Maintenance planning

6.2.1 How to prepare maintenance plans

6.2.2 Adjusting the frequency of preventive actions

6.2.3 Turning the PDCA cycle to optimize planned preventive maintenance

6.3 Maintenance standardization 

6.3.1 Types of maintenance standards

6.3.2 Maintenance technical standards

6.3.3 Revision of maintenance technical standards

6.3.4 How to ensure compliance with the maintenance technical standards

6.3.5 How to promote the standardization of maintenance

6.4 Conclusion

7 How to improve the utilization of maintenance resources

7.1 Introduction

7.2 Design of the maintenance organization

7.2.1 Responsibilities for maintenance management activities

7.2.2 Responsibilities for execution activities

7.3 Management of spare parts inventory

7.3.1 Materials management methods

7.3.2 Some considerations on the storage of spare parts

7.4 Maintenance budget management

7.4.1 Maintenance costs 

7.4.2 Preparation of annual maintenance budget

7.4.3 Controlling and reviewing the maintenance budget

7.4.4 How to reduce maintenance costs

8 Building operator care and ownership of their equipment

8.1 Introduction

8.2 Operator-owner

8.3 Maintenance by the operators 

8.3.1 Concept of operator care

8.4 Efficient maintenance triangle

8.4.1 Cooperation between maintenance and production

8.5 Some misconceptions about operator care

8.6 Work distribution between maintenance and production teams

8.6.1 Basic operator care activities

8.6.2 The role of operators as owners of their equipment

8.6.3 Role of maintenance teams in supporting operator care and making improvements

8.7 Training of operators to develop their sense of equipment ownership

8.7.1 Developing the skills of operators

8.7.2 How to conduct the training of operators

8.8 Standardization of machine care by operators 

8.8.1 How to increase the efficiency of operator care activities

8.9 Putting operator care in practice

8.10 Steps to prepare the implementation of operator care

8.11 Steps in the implementation of operator care

8.11.1 Step 1: Perform an initial cleaning of the machine

8.11.2 Step 2: Identify the causes of abnormalities and establish countermeasures

8.11.3 Step 3: Standardize operator care activities

8.11.4 Step 4: Develop general equipment inspection skills

8.11.5 Step 5: Promote equipment inspections

8.11.6 Step 6: Organize and manage the workplace

8.11.7 Step 7: Sustain the implementation of operator care

8.12 Assessing the implementation of operator care

8.13 Conclusion

9 Training and education

9.1 Introduction

9.2 The knowledge and efficiency of maintenance

9.3 Development of maintenance skills

9.3.1 Knowledge and technical skills to perform maintenance

9.3.2 Knowledge and managerial skills

9.4 Developing training for maintenance teams

9.4.1 Determining training objectives

9.4.2 Assessing existing levels of knowledge and skills

9.4.3 The training of beginner technicians

9.5 The training pattern

9.6 Conclusion

Appendix A: The road to manufacturing excellence

Appendix B: Measuring losses: failure rate, utilization rate and equipment availability

Appendix C: Application of 5S principles in maintenance areas

References

Preface

More organizations, if not all of them these days, have been pressured to remain competitive in rapidly changing markets. They have been confronted with the customer ’s increasing demands for near-perfect quality and on-time deliveries of their products. Those pressures have brought renewed concerns about their own internal efficiencies and productivities, and inquiries about how they will be able to survive in markets that are becoming harder and harder to serve. Additionally, there are increasing pressures to perform on safety and to be fully compliant with stricter environmental rules and regulations.

Asset-intensive industries fight continually to get all the utilization they can out of their aged or even brand-new facilities, with as much efficiency as possible. There is generally very little capital available to invest, and an even tighter squeeze on manufacturing costs of every budget cycle. Companies operating in such challenging markets cannot afford to suffer from the production losses caused by unexpected and unplanned equipment failures, or from long and inefficient turnarounds and shutdowns of their critical equipment.

In this scenario, companies all over the world are being called to pursue a vision of perfection in all the processes that form their value-creation chains, and embark on a journey to manufacturing excellence where maintenance becomes a strategic business process.

From their traditional reactive repair culture of fixing things after they break, over the years, maintenance has shifted to a more pivotal role within organizations, and nowadays it is widely recognized as a pillar of manufacturing excellence. Those increasingly tighter markets have brought about this shift for maintenance, and upper management’s attention has recently turned to answer the question “how do we capture the full value that maintenance can provide to our organization?” Indeed, the development of maintenance management now goes hand in hand with the widely practiced and well-established tools and techniques that improve the performance of the core production processes.

I have seen this shift occurring in more and more companies. Maintenance – once a disorganized, reactive, and a mere cost adding function in many factories – is taking center stage as the newly-discovered target of continuous improvement and transformational initiatives focused on eliminating equipment failures and maximizing productivity. In very few companies that my work brings me to, I observe excellent or near perfect levels of maintenance management. But despite some encouraging movements and success stories here and there, star performers in maintenance are still too few, and I still see most maintenance struggling a great deal to overcome their difficulties to replace old practices with better and improved ones. Typically, a repair culture still prevails, and failure root-cause analysis is either incomplete or not done at all. Preventive maintenance is ineffective, overdone, costly, poorly executed, or simply inexistent. Maintenance work standards are inadequate, not enforced or do not exist, and the knowledge and skills of maintenance technicians and equipment operators are insufficient.

We have learned that the best-performing manufacturing companies put maintenance at the heart of their continuous improvement processes. They foster close cooperation and mutual support between maintenance technicians and production operators, and they integrate operator care activities into the standard operating procedures, enforcing the compliance with those standards religiously amongst the operators. Maintenance tasks are standardized with equal structure and rigor. Skills and knowledge are promoted amongst the equipment operators and maintenance technicians to maximize overall work performance and efficiency. 5S is exemplary in all areas, and viewed by everyone as a foundation of excellent performance.

The best companies treat equipment failures with discipline and structure, and see them as opportunities to improve their maintenance management system or the equipment itself. They conduct root cause analysis in a holistic and systemic way, improving the maintenance processes, the equipment design, the operator’s standard operating procedures, maintenance standards and maintenance plans in order to avoid reoccurrence.

The best companies plan and execute maintenance tasks better, allocating resources early and more precisely, based on the criticality of equipment, risks and consequences of failures. Those companies act to introduce improvements since the early design stages of the life cycles of new equipment, in order to increase their reliability and maintainability during the operation phase. They track leading metrics of equipment performance and measure losses from ideal to attack the major causes of poor performance.

It is often challenging for executives and managers to establish a correlation between the implementation of some of those maintenance best practices and their impact on the bottom-line of the organization. For example, is 5S just a nice thing to have in the maintenance shop, and what is its real impact? How about visual management and deployment of KPIs to the factory floor? What is the impact of planning, scheduling, and regular reviews of preventive maintenance? For those managers who are still struggling to establish if that correlation really exists, it is reassuring to learn that a leading consulting firm ran a worldwide research involving dozens of manufacturing sites of different sectors, aiming to correlate various maintenance best practices with plant output. The data revealed that those sites with higher scores of maintenance practices had the highest output efficiencies.

This book is about pursuing those improvement opportunities in maintenance. It describes simple and yet powerful managerial best practices of some of the world’s best-performing manufacturing companies. Maintenance and production managers, engineers, plant managers, and executives will find in this book detailed and practical guidance on how to unleash the hidden values in their operations, creating lasting productive maintenance transformations in their organizations.

Executives and managers in various industries should seek to understand very clearly the principles of productive maintenance and work with discipline and constancy of purpose to harness their plant’s improvement power and bring maintenance management at least one or two generations ahead of where it finds itself now. I believe that better maintenance practices will not bring gains to the industrial sector alone. The whole society will benefit from a new way of thinking about maintenance, and this new way of thinking should be disseminated amply by the companies, universities and governments.

By sharing proven knowledge and tools, my intention is that this book makes a significant contribution in that direction. I encourage executives, managers and supervisors to study and practice the tools described in the following chapters with faith and enthusiasm, to powerfully reach unprecedented results and make their companies more productive and competitive.

Chicago, November 2017

Harilaus Georgius d’Philippos Xenos

Chapter 1Overview ofequipment maintenance

1 Overview of equipment maintenance

1.1 Introduction

Although the maintenance of equipment has been a key activity across many industries, and that most companies understand its value for operational reliability and business excellence, it is still common to find some confusion and misconceptions about the principles of maintenance, as simple as they may be. These misconceptions can be very costly for companies: either from lower asset reliability or higher maintenance costs per se.

The main issue that this chapter addresses is the need for a clear and uniform understanding of the methods of maintenance and the way of thinking supporting the overarching concept of productive maintenance. This chapter will clarify key definitions; organize ideas and interrelationships of the various maintenance methods inside productive maintenance. Finally, this chapter will describe how the various elements of maintenance management work together as a system with the maintenance plan at the core.

1.2 Definition of maintenance

Maintenance is the combination of technical and administrative actions, including supervision, with the objective of retaining or restoring a component or piece of equipment to a state in which it can perform its required functions. Namely, to maintain means to do everything that is necessary to ensure that equipment continues to function according to its design, and at the required level of performance.

To that effect, maintenance exists to avoid the degradation of assets caused by their natural wear and their usage. Degradation happens in a variety of ways and degrees: from bad external appearance, to partial or complete loss of function, production interruptions and downtime, poor quality products, safety and environmental hazards.

Maintenance typically includes activities related to failure prevention – through periodic basic care, inspections, overhauls and replacement of parts – and the treatment of failures after they have occurred: detection and repair of the failures, investigation of the root causes and taking countermeasures to block their recurrence.

Since maintenance often represents a large element in a manufacturing site, and play an important role in productivity, its impact cannot simply be overlooked. Even in companies where maintenance costs might have only a small impact on the bottom-line, maintenance can still influence overall costs by ensuring that the equipment operate reliably.

1.3 The scope of maintenance activities beyond just maintaining

Many problems still occur because some maintenance professionals do not realize what the real scope of their activities should be. In a stricter sense, maintenance activities will be limited to the return of equipment to its original condition. Nevertheless, in a broader sense, maintenance activities should also involve modifying the original condition of the equipment by introducing improvements to prevent the occurrence or recurrence of failures, to reduce costs, or increase OEE and productivity. Only maintaining conditions is often insufficient for business excellence. Therefore, improvements should also be part of the maintenance work.

Improvements generally modify an equipment’s original operating conditions, its performance and intrinsic reliability, by incorporating modifications or changes to their original design or configuration. Improvements may also bring specific technical and managerial best practices that result in the modification of existing standards and procedures.

Finally, major modifications that aim to largely increase production capacity are outside the immediate scope of maintenance activities. Nonetheless, depending on their complexity and the technical resources required, existing maintenance teams within the companies, often in cooperation with engineering, may plan and implement such major modifications.

In synthesis, we may consider that the purpose of maintenance is to not only maintain or restore the physical condition of the equipment, but primarily to maintain and improve its functional capabilities. Namely, in addition to keeping what the equipment is physically, it is necessary to maintain what it can do functionally. In fact, maintaining the physical condition of the equipment has the ultimate objective of maintaining its functional capacity, as well as product quality, safety and environmental integrity.

To facilitate the understanding of this concept, let us illustrate it through a practical example.

Example 1.1

In a beverage factory, one of the critical processes is the filling of cans and bottles. If a particular line is designed for a capacity of 120,000 cans per hour, in principle, maintenance must work to maintain the capacity of the equipment steady. Thus, a wide variety of maintenance services will be required. For example, periodic cleaning, lubrication of bearings, alignments, tightening; replacement of parts with limited service life, vibration control, and overhaul of components that wear out over time. All these tasks aim to maintain certain physical conditions that are indispensable for the maintenance of the performance expected from the equipment, e.g. its functional capacity.

In addition to ensuring the good performance of equipment, maintenance is important to ensure the quality of the product during processing. In this case, the physical conditions of the filling machine must include the correct cleaning, filling and labelling of the cans, and that damage to the cans will not occur during conveyor transportation, capping, pasteurizing, packaging and stacking processes.

Eventual failures will certainly reduce the functional capacity of the line, either by a slower pace of production, the generation of defective products or by frequent interruptions and downtimes. Therefore, maintenance activities affect the reliability of a piece of equipment and the Overall Equipment Efficiency (OEE) of the entire line.

Concurrently with the effects on OEE, improvements also aim to increase productivity by reducing maintenance costs. For example, relocating gearboxes of the can conveyors may be necessary to reduce maintenance time, or redesign some parts to make them stronger.

1.4 Productive maintenance

As an overarching concept, productive maintenance can be understood as the optimum application of various maintenance methods to optimize the economic factors of production, ensuring the best use and high productivity of the equipment with the lowest overall cost.

Productive maintenance includes activities along all stages of the life cycle of the equipment, from their early specification to their decommissioning, and considers the maintenance costs and productivity of the equipment throughout its entire life cycle.

Productive maintenance also follows the principle that the actions of the maintenance department alone will be insufficient to ensure the performance of the equipment, so it seeks the close cooperation with other departments of the company, mainly with production and engineering. After all, the design of the equipment and the way it is operated by production also directly influence its maintenance costs.

In summary, the fundamental goal of productive maintenance is not simply to avoid equipment failures, but also to apply the best combination of maintenance methods throughout its life cycle to maximize productivity, resulting in a high economic result for the whole company.

Next, let us have a look at the various maintenance methods under productive maintenance.

1.4.1 Corrective maintenance

As a method, corrective maintenance is the choice to fix a component or piece of equipment after the failure has occurred. In principle, the choice for this method of maintenance should consider risks and economic factors: what is the risk – likelihood vs. consequences – of the failure? Is it more economical to fix a failure than to take preventive actions? If so, corrective maintenance is a sound option.

From the strict point of view of maintenance costs, corrective maintenance is cheaper than the prevention of failures. On the other hand, from a risk point of view, it can also create safety and environmental hazards, production interruptions and downtimes. Therefore, consider thoroughly the criticality of equipment to the production process, and the consequences if it fails. If there are preventive actions that can avoid the occurrence of equipment failures, are these actions technically and economically feasible? If there are no viable and cost-effective preventive actions, then how do we mitigate the consequences of the failure while it may still happen.

Furthermore, to choose corrective maintenance it is still necessary to organize resources – spare parts, labor and tooling – in order to act quickly and minimize the impacts of the failure. For example, have in stock pre-assembled components or kits ready for quick replacements.

It is also important to note that, although corrective maintenance may have been chosen for its economical advantages, we cannot simply be conformed with the occurrence of failures as something that is expected and, therefore, acceptable. A key continuous improvement mindset, even in the case of choosing to fix, is to strive to precisely identify the root causes of the failure and block them in order to prevent its recurrence.

1.4.2 Preventive maintenance

Prevention should be the main concern of maintenance in any company, and an effective preventive maintenance plan should be at the heart of productive maintenance, thus, an optimized set of effective time- and condition-based activities.

Compared to corrective maintenance – from the maintenance cost point of view only – preventive maintenance can be more expensive, because parts may have to be replaced, and components may have to be overhauled before the end of their useful lives.

On the other hand, through effective preventive maintenance the frequency of occurrence of failures and unexpected interruptions of production will be very rare, and the availability of equipment higher. If we consider the total cost, preventive maintenance often ends up being cheaper than corrective maintenance.

A common misconception of preventive maintenance is to associate it only with the periodic, time-based interventions for the replacement of parts and overhaul of components, when preventive maintenance also actually includes on-condition, or predictive interventions. Still unbeknownst to many people in maintenance, parts and components are up to seven times more likely to fail prematurely sometime in their early life, typically originating from problems of manufacture, assemble or installation.

However, by being overcautious and assuming that items will always increasingly fail as they age, meaning increasing probabilities of failure over time, companies simply resort to only time-based interventions for all of their critical or even less critical equipment. This might be causing more harm by actually inducing errors and introducing causes of failure at each intervention, due to the more frequent disassembling and reassembling, removal and reinstallations, switching equipment off and on again, and so on.

From a compliance point of view, most companies already have some sort of preventive maintenance plan created. However, what we typically see on the factory floor of many of them is maintenance trapped in a reactive cycle of failure repairs, barely allocating time for preventive maintenance. This time usually ends up mostly consumed by unanticipated failures and a backlog of work orders that are difficult to manage.

The other extreme is to see maintenance burdened by over maintaining the equipment, with too frequent or too many interventions. A common myth is that adding more time- or condition-based preventive maintenance is safer, when, in reality, maintenance may be over servicing the equipment with no added benefits, just the risk of inducing failures and increasing costs.

The key to effective prevention is to create an optimized plan with the minimally necessary time- and condition-based activities that substantively contribute to reliability. Then, execute this plan with a high degree of compliance, and seek to optimize it continually through regular feedbacks from the technicians on the factory floor. The plan should never be static: review activities and intervals periodically, and look for opportunities to improve it.

1.4.3 Predictive maintenance – Condition-based interventions

As a subset of preventive maintenance, predictive maintenance allows optimizing the time of replacement of parts and overhaul of components, and extends maintenance intervals, because it allows predicting when the part or component will be close to the end of its expected useful life. Instead of time-based interventions regardless of condition, disassemble and removals of parts and components under predictive maintenance will happen based on the condition of the item.

The technology available today has enabled the development of dozens of predictive maintenance techniques and hand-held instruments, which have become simpler, accessible to more professionals, and fully connected with computerized maintenance management systems. Predictive maintenance has become is a fairly simple and effective maintenance method that brings good results.

For example, by monitoring the vibration trends of the equipment, it is possible to predict when to change the bearings. It is also possible to predict the time to overhaul mechanical components by analyzing the lubricating oil.

1.4.4 Improvement of equipment

Another key method of maintenance is the improvement or "kaizen" – of the equipment. The Japanese word "kaizen" means to make improvements. The use of this word implies the gradual and continuous nature of the improvements. In the context of maintenance, "kaizen" applied to the equipment means improving them continuously beyond their original specifications.

For example, instead of simply returning the equipment to their original condition after a failure occurs, thoroughly investigate the root causes and improve their design, operating and maintenance standards. This is one of the weak points of maintenance. In many companies, maintenance means only checking if all is working fine and repairing what has broken – removing the symptom of the failure and returning the equipment to production, until it fails again.

We must always set OEE-based improvement goals for the equipment, even if failures did not occur. For example, increased life of equipment; reduction in the occurrence of failures; reduction of the time for maintenance activities; reduction of the cost of spare parts, among others

Improvement activities entail specific technical and managerial actions that result in the modification of existing standards and procedures.

1.4.5 Maintenance prevention

We must also practice maintenance prevention combined with the other methods of maintenance. Maintenance prevention consists of activities in cooperation with the engineers and manufacturers since the early phases of design and build of the equipment, in order to reduce the maintenance load required during its operation – improve maintainability.

For example, if a power generator was incorrectly specified during the design phase of an industrial plant, maintenance activities alone during the operation phase may be insufficient to ensure the reliability of the plant. Of course, the solution to this problem goes beyond the reach of routine maintenance activities, and only improvement activities will be able to improve the reliability of the power generator. For example, by installing a larger generator with more capacity.

An undesirable option would be to reduce the power demand for the generator, thus, allow it to operate within its original specification limits. In practice, having equipment that is capable of meeting production expectations, rather than adapting production to equipment limitations, is a better practice.

In his book, Design and Manage to Life Cycle Cost (1978), Blanchard suggests that 95% of the volume of maintenance services required in the phase of operation of the equipment is defined until the design and development phases. Therefore, maintenance prevention aims to act while the equipment is only on the drawing board, when it is easier and cheaper to modify specifications.

Furthermore, equipment design deficiencies may be at the center of relationship issues between maintenance and production because of the intrinsic lack of capacity of some equipment to meet production expectations, and the inability of maintenance to deal with design deficiencies. Tensions and finger pointing will come from both sides: production blaming maintenance for not doing their job well; maintenance blaming production for not operating the equipment correctly.

Therefore, maintenance and production teams need to be involved since the design phase of new equipment, reviewing their technical specifications from the points of view of reliability and maintainability.

1.4.6 Concept of operator care

Many times, the poor performance of the equipment is due to the poor cooperation between production and maintenance, and low technical skills of the operators. To make maintenance even more effective, one way to do this is to increase the skills of operators to take basic care of their equipment, and also to detect and treat abnormalities at an early stage. Operator care is a simple yet powerful strategy to build operator ownership of their equipment (“my machine”). Building on a foundation of 5S operators develop inspection skills through daily cleaning and lubrication, and by checking critical points in their equipment.

Additionally, operator care brings alignment and improve the cooperation between operators and maintenance technicians. More and more, operator care gains ground in numerous industries, but sometimes with the misconception that it works independently from the maintenance team.

We must be careful not to fall into this trap! Operator care is only effective when a preventive maintenance plan is already in place, and we must understand it as a division of tasks between production and maintenance under one single preventive maintenance plan. In fact, the preventive maintenance plan developed by the maintenance department form the basis of operator care. In Chapter 8, we will provide a detailed description of best practices for operator care activities, and the steps for its implementation.

1.4.7 What is the best method of equipment maintenance?

We can simultaneously apply a combination of the different methods of maintenance described before to different parts of the same piece of equipment. The best productive maintenance strategy will be the most appropriate combination of the various methods, depending on the nature and criticality of the equipment for the production. The best practice is to choose the most appropriate, efficient and economical methods for each case, abandoning the discussion to decide which maintenance is best.

To illustrate this way of thinking, let us imagine the various methods of maintenance applied to a car. On some parts of a car, it will be better to perform corrective maintenance. For example, we only replace the windshield wipers when they are not removing the rainwater properly. Likewise, lamps and headlights are only replaced after they burn. As for preventive maintenance, we periodically change timing belts, engine oil, filters and other critical parts before the car shows a failure. Finally, we can perform predictive maintenance by periodically checking the condition of brake pads and the depth of the tire grooves, changing them only when they reach a previously specified limit, say, 2 mm deep.

In synthesis, when designing the maintenance strategy, apply maintenance methods that are compatible with the possible failures of the parts and components of the pieces of equipment and their effects on productivity, quality and safety. There are specific tools and techniques for identifying the effects of equipment failures and applicable maintenance methods, namely the Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) and Failure Modes and Effect Analysis (FMEA).

1.5 Maintenance support processes

The integrated application of the maintenance methods, as the elements of the productive maintenance strategy, combined with some fundamental capabilities, will enable the maintenance organization to deliver its full value of maximizing asset productivity. Briefly, these fundamental capabilities are:

♦ Root cause analysis of equipment failures

This capability includes the activities to remove the symptoms and identify the root causes of failures, taking the appropriate countermeasures to block recurrence. It also includes the recording and analysis of data on equipment failures, which allows managers to identify objectively the most frequent failure modes and the equipment in which they occur. Chapter 4 describes the capability of root cause analysis in detail.

♦ Standardization of maintenance

Standardization is the capability to comply with work procedures and standards related to technical and managerial activities of equipment maintenance. Maintenance work procedures and standards include maintenance manuals, inspection checklists, and test procedures, among many others. Furthermore, standardization of maintenance is the capability to train, audit and certify technicians and other maintenance professionals based on their work procedures and standards. Chapter 6 will describe the standardization of maintenance in detail.

♦ Maintenance planning and scheduling

Maintenance planning and scheduling are the activities of preparation of resources for planned maintenance work, which defines when to perform preventive actions and repairs. This capability involves the distribution of maintenance services in a given period, as well as planning the labor, materials and tools required to execute those services. The precise planning of maintenance work based on standards for planned preventive maintenance allows the correct sizing of those resources and gives predictability to the maintenance process. These aspects will be presented in Chapters 6 and 7.

♦ Spare parts and warehouse

The purpose of this process is to acquire, store and control the spare parts and consumables of equipment, according to their preventive maintenance needs. It is one of the most critical support processes and can make performing maintenance difficult if not managed efficiently. The proper functioning of the equipment depends on the availability of spare parts of good quality, and at the right time. This process is detailed in Chapter 7.

♦ Maintenance budgeting

The purpose of this capability is to allow the distribution and control of the financial resources allocated to maintenance activities, based on the maintenance plan for the coming periods. The maintenance budget comprises the costs of labor, outsourced services and materials, such as spare parts and consumables for the equipment. The key to preparing the maintenance budget is to estimate, as precisely as possible, the required labor and material resources, which must be done based on the maintenance plan. In Chapter 7 we will provide a more detailed description of maintenance budgeting.

♦ Skills development

This capability is the transfer and practice of knowledge, through formal and on-the-job education and training, aiming to qualify maintenance technicians to perform well in their positions and fulfill their responsibilities as maintainer-improvers of equipment performance. This capability also includes developing the skills of the operators to perform some preventive maintenance tasks on the day-to-day basis of production. We have found that one of the most common and most serious deficiencies in many companies is the insufficient skills of both maintenance technicians and production operators.

With inadequate training and education and lower skills, technicians might not be effective doing their jobs, and may eventually introduce failures in equipment rather than preventing them. The same can happen with production operators, who may be inducing equipment failures by operating them incorrectly or abusing them. This capability will be discussed with more detail in Chapter 9.

1.6 Maintenance as the driver of manufacturing and business performance

The set of maintenance methods and capabilities that we have just shown provide the framework of a maintenance management system that aims to keep manufacturing facilities running reliably, and achieving their superordinate objectives of safety, quality, cost and productivity, delivery and morale.

The interrelationship between the various elements is shown in the diagram of FIG. 1.

FIGURE 1 – Overview of equipment maintenance as a driver of manufacturing excellence

Within the activities of the maintenance department, we locate the maintenance methods, with productive maintenance as the combination of the maintenance methods. Preventive maintenance is at the very center. Also, notice that predictive maintenance is shown in the diagram as a subset of preventive maintenance.

We can also notice the overlapping relationships between preventive maintenance and equipment improvement, and the overlaps between equipment improvement and maintenance prevention, and between equipment improvement and corrective maintenance. This means that equipment improvements drive the elimination of failures and PM optimization – by reducing the volume of corrective maintenance – and by reducing the volume of preventive maintenance required by the equipment during the phase of operations – by introducing improvements since the early stages of design, or even during the stage of operations in the equipment’s life cycle.

Finally, there is an extremely important interrelationship between production and maintenance activities shown in FIG. 1. Still under the overarching concept of productive maintenance, several activities of the production department are also essential to ensure the proper functioning of the equipment. The essential activity for production is the operation of the equipment itself. Operators may cause failures by improperly operating their equipment, and when failing to comply with standard operating procedures, for example.

In many cases, we can prevent this by enhancing operator training and certification to comply compliance with standard operating procedures, as shown in the following example.

Example 1.2

A railroad company observed recurring failures of electric drive motors installed in their locomotives, affecting locomotive availability and maintenance costs. An investigation of the problem showed that the fundamental cause of these electric motor failures was the inappropriate operation of the locomotives. Initiating reversing maneuvers with the locomotive still in forward motion was a common practice among operators, which caused excessive strain on the motor’s mounting screws. In order to block this fundamental cause, all operators were retrained in standard operating procedures and, according to these procedures; reversing maneuvers should only be initiated when the locomotives were in full stop.

In addition to the required training in equipment operation procedures, production operators should also be supported by upper management and trained to perform basic care tasks aimed at maintaining their own equipment – as long as the execution of these tasks by the operators contributes to increase the work efficiency of the maintenance work.

Usually the maintenance tasks performed by the operators themselves are quite simple and, in most cases, the operators can accomplish them without major difficulties and without compromising their main activities. The goal of training operators in these simple maintenance tasks is to enable specialized teams of maintenance technicians to focus their efforts on more complex tasks and improvements, which requiring more technical skills.

This is the principle of operator care that we described before, and is covered in detail in Chapter 8. Looking again at FIG. 1, operator care appears as the whole intersection area between maintenance and production departments.

Let us look at one successful example of operator care:

Example 1.3

Pressured by frequent equipment breakdowns, customer complaints and with a very disorganized and dirty factory floor, a wire rope manufacturing plant decided to embrace operator care as one of the pillars of the transformation of their results. The plant manager personally led this effort, engaging top down the whole team in the plant: maintenance, production, QA and QC, office, and logistics.

First, they laid a foundation of 5S, skills development and equipment PMs in parallel. Kicked off by the plant manager, 5S started daily with a mandatory 30-minute equipment shutdown at 10am for the entire team to organize and clean the machines and areas. Every headcount in the factory participated daily, no exceptions. Being so disorganized and dirty, in the beginning, improvements in the factory were hard to notice in that 30-minute window, but after a few weeks of constant purpose and concerted effort, it was a new factory.

After a few months, with the 5S foundation firmly in place 30 minutes every day, next was to have maintenance and production work together on operator care initially in a pilot area. While maintenance worked on their standardization and PMs, they helped the operators to created and post visual management, daily, weekly and monthly checks for production and maintenance by the machines. Operators received training and simple hand tools and supplies to do basic inspections, lubrications and some basic fixes. The cultural change created by the 5S created and sustained a plant-wide cooperation between maintenance and production.

1.7 A systems-view of maintenance management

To be successful, managers need to develop continually their holistic way of thinking about maintenance as a system, not a collection of isolated events that needs addressing reactively one-by-one, as they happen.