Preventive maintenance is a critical factor to future-proof your manufacturing operations. As a discrete manufacturer, you need a complete solution to reduce the chances of production failures and this is where you must focus on preventive maintenance, repair, and overhauling to your equipment. To ensure quality performance, you have to take appropriate measures to extend the productive life of your machines operating in manufacturing plants.
The preventive maintenance management module available in a scalable manufacturing ERP will provide you all the necessary tools to plan, schedule, and monitor a complete maintenance program for machines, gauges, auxiliary equipment, and all other tools used in production.
Well, before stepping into understanding the functionalities of an ERP’s preventive maintenance module, you should have a clear idea about what preventive maintenance is, the associated elements and objectives, and the activities linked to it.
Let’s explore the details.
Preventive Maintenance Explained:
Preventive maintenance management is a recipe of routine activities performed in a well-planned manner to avoid production breakouts. For instance, the major components of preventive maintenance in the manufacturing industry include lubrication and inspection.
Lubrication is necessary for prolonged life and safe working of all equipment on the shop floor or anywhere in the production plant without any mishap. On the other hand, inspection helps in detecting the faults in an equipment so that it can be timely repaired or finding and replacing a defective part of a machine before it turns into a complete breakdown and puts your production on halt.
Preventive Maintenance Activities:
Preventive maintenance in manufacturing involves the following activities.
Direct Activities:
- Equipment cleaning & inspection
- Equipment lubrication to avoid wear
- Programmed repair or replacement
Indirect Activities
- Improve condition monitoring
- Failure statistics and reports
- Machine modifications to reduce wear
Preventive Maintenance of Production Plant:
Manufacturing plant services primarily include preventive maintenance functions – categorized as:
- Preventive maintenance of manufacturing plant services:
The most important services in this subdivision requiring preventive maintenance include:
- Production facility
- Power plant
- Material handling equipment
- Transportation vehicles
- Waste disposal systems
- Fire fighting facilities, etc.
- Preventive maintenance of production departments:
The production-related preventive maintenance to ensure reliability includes:
- Periodic maintenance
- Equipment servicing
- Anticipatory inspection
- Electrical system repair
- Defective part replacements
- Scheduled repairs, overhauling, etc.
What Makes Preventive Maintenance Necessary?
You need all machines on the shop floor and production line to be more reliable and efficient. This is why you need preventive maintenance that will help you maintain your shop floor performance by ensuring that each equipment and tool is working with optimum potential. It helps maintain the equipment condition to prevent any unexpected downtime because of machine failure. You cannot afford equipment breakdowns that will put your production on halt at any point of order fulfillment.
Periodic and scheduled maintenance allows you to save the cost by timely checking, fixing, and replacing the damaged or defective machine or any of its parts prior to actual failure. The potential consequences of equipment failure during production are far higher than the costs of repairing or replacing service.
Often manufacturers consider the maintenance as an expense and try to cut it down as the first thing in the times of financial crises. However, it refers to a false economy because the amount spent on preventing the machine from breakdowns is always less compared to the money incurred in case of machine failure during production.
Types of Preventive Maintenance:
Preventive maintenance in manufacturing commonly occurs in four forms depending on the nature of the job and time constraint.
- Work-based maintenance
Refers to the maintenance processes carried out after a specified number of operating hours, depending on the work done on a particular machine. For example, in automobile manufacturing, if a CNC (computerized numerical control) machine daily runs for 20 hours, then it must undergo scheduled maintenance after every 2-3 weeks. In case of a bottleneck, it should be done within a week. So, it depends on the machine usage and especially when the rate of work is constant.
- Time-based maintenance
Refers to maintenance processes conducted as a routine – at regular intervals such as every 2-3 months. Usually, these are the planned maintenance of the machines that are less prone to deterioration or their wear and tear is likely to be time-dependent instead of usage-dependent. Again, it is also usage-dependent and hence, you need to monitor the time and workload that particular machine experiences. For instance, boring machines used in the automobile industry to produce accurate and smooth holes in a workpiece or reboring the motor cycle’s engine cylinder. - Condition-based maintenance
Now, this is the unplanned inspection and maintenance of the machines. It becomes essential when after inspecting a machine you find some problem despite it is functioning pretty well. For example, a conveyor belt requiring an overhaul due to loading issues or when it gets damaged and replacement becomes inevitable when items are placed haphazardly on it. This type of preventive maintenance depends on the condition of the equipment and for which continuous monitoring is essential preceding an immediate inspection to ensure the machine's efficiency quotient. It could be easily done with dynamic machine monitoring software. - Opportunity-based maintenance
Refers to kind of regular maintenance when repair or replacement of equipment can be done when it’s not required to work. For example, during holidays you can overhaul or replace the problematic parts and machines without affecting the steady production line performance. As the name implies, opportunity-based maintenance can be done when it’s convenient. You can also call it planned maintenance of a system based on the feedback information to make necessary changes or fixes for its upkeep.
Objectives of manufacturing-related Preventive Maintenance:
The various objectives of preventive maintenance in the manufacturing industry are as follows:
- Reducing the chances of unexpected production interruptions.
- Keeping all machines ready for use with optimum working potential.
- Controlling the work content of shop floor and production line maintenance jobs.
- Maintaining the equipment value through periodic inspection, overhauling, repairs.
- Ensuring the product quality and safety of life of the labor working on machines.
- Eliminating disruptions in executing master production schedule by improving equipment longevity.
Wrap Up:
MIE Trak Pro is an intelligent and dynamic preventive maintenance management - ERP software for manufacturing that will surely help you reduce the possibilities of production failures due to machine damage or inefficiency.
