Maintenance Best Practices

Plant Improvements

Maintenance Best Practices

02 Oct. 2022
04 min read

It was in response to covid-19 related production slowdown in Indian auto industries and industries in General…. It’s the dream of every maintenance head, had they got some time out of break-downs vortices, they can organize their department more. Then came a unwelcomed Economic/ Market slowdown .Consequently working shift or working days were reduced to match production requirement. With these reduction in production hours , Equipment are available for maintenance. Maintenance craftsmen are available for pending works and Maintenance Engineers/ Manager available for strategic planning for equipment maintenance. But for some maintenance departments, Its all comes to stand-still when Breakdowns fades away ( result of equipment not used for production) or left with few trivial task in hand. These are symptoms of maintenance department too much working on day-today shop floor problems and hardly had any mechanism to make use of “Those Hard Learning’ to evolve maintenance landscape of these plants. Following are few point what maintenance department can do when they don’t have breakdowns but abundance of machine time and man-days to work.

1. Plan and do 5S in Systematic way, 5S being the base of performance pyramid need upmost attention.

2. Arrange/ Store Spares, WIPs, Consumable in most convenient manner from user point of view.

3. Systematically arrange your machine manuals and part drawings so they are easy to retrieve when needed( During Breakdowns).

4. Find out spare/ Consumable whose drawings are required but not available, This is time to open machines( Cautiously) and get dimensions/ Specs on records.

5. Initiate Spare part development activities, starting with design, improved materials and finding new vendor base for work executions.

6. Re-routing / Tagging/ Housekeeping of required control cable/ power cables for easingout work around them.

7. Work out training need analysis(TNI) of your team meticulously, leaving no stone unturned. Design classroom and OJB training programs. Most of the training can be done with inhouse resources, other can be out sourced.

8. To possible extend complete your RCAs of pending Breakdowns. Never forget to share these observation with your team ( to get astonishing overall performances)

9. Review your Equipment Preventive Maintenance Check sheets. All learned lessons out of RCAs shall be included as preventive inspections/ actions

10. Carry out all pending PMs, Machine inspections and modification planed (promised way back at distress times, solaces to BD fears !!)

11. Review your equipment maintenance needs in most inclusive manner. Workout on each and every subassembly and part for Failure Mode and Effect Analysis (FMEA) it is right time to go about Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) intensive analysis of your equipment maintenance requirement.

12. Meticulously workout/ document maintenance work flow, update / add new related formats so to have robust maintenance control system

13. Find out what new maintenance technologies are available to help in your long standing problems( You can always buy later on)

14. Update your spare list with criticality-classifications, workout the levels of spare will be required with systematic risk-cost analysis( when production become normal) 15. Workout plans / Make provision for mounting of lifting tackles, welding Machine / power tools electrical sockets.

16. Carryout paint/ anti corrosive treatment as per your plant requirements.

17. Work out on Energy Saving Projects, lot can be plan and save without going for major work/costs. Pledge to make plant free of air/water/ fluid leakages.

18. Carryout necessary servicing of HT and LT distributions hardware. To Possible extent check overhead and underground Cables conditions.

19. Plans shall be drawn and execute to structural integrity of shed structures machine supporting structure, provisions for reaching and working on heights.

20. Check your critical spares at Store/ Elsewhere for quantities ( as per records) and storage conditions.