Maintenance planning is an important element of every manufacturing process. The proper maintenance plan ensures the efficient operation of machinery. It also increases productivity and profits.
Maintenance planners play an essential role in this procedure. They are accountable for preparing and implementing effective maintenance strategies, ensuring that equipment is functioning in good working order. We will review the most effective ways to plan maintenance for manufacturing processes.
What is Maintenance Planning?
The process of planning maintenance is the creation of a maintenance plan. It outlines when equipment and machinery need inspection or repair and when they must keep in good condition. Maintenance planners are responsible for establishing and managing this plan.
This helps prevent breakages, reduce downtime, and lower repair costs. Also, maintenance planners ensure that your preventive maintenance plan is followed through every step of the way.
Maintenance Planning Best Practices
Maintenance planning is a crucial aspect of any industrial or commercial enterprise. We will discuss some of the best practices your manufacturing company can employ.
1. Base Decisions on Data
Planners have to make their decisions based on the data for maintenance-related tasks. Computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) are essential to keeping track of this information.
But ensuring you’re using the information you collect is important. The essential performance indicators for planning maintenance are compliance with preventive maintenance schedules. This information includes things such as, the ratio of work orders compared to scheduled jobs, work order backlog, and the mean time to fix.
This information can help to assign appropriate prioritization to the tasks you are working on. Avoid untrue prioritization and identify how work processes could improve.
2. Focus on Tasks to Support Reliability
The priority of tasks should be to help ensure the reliability of. The idea is to focus preventive maintenance efforts on reducing incidents that could threaten your business. In the absence of an emergency, all else should be secondary.
3. Make Sure Materials are Available Onsite
A second best practice is ensuring your maintenance personnel are well-equipped for each task. It is important to ensure that you have the tools required whenever you start with your PM plan and that parts are available before even actually starting the task.
Your employees must carry the relevant manuals before leaving for the work site. Also, they must be able to access the data on their mobile devices.
4. Invest in Maintenance Scheduling Software
Investing in maintenance scheduling software is the most crucial ideal practice for maintenance. If you buy maintenance scheduling software, you gain many benefits. The scheduling of maintenance for assets is not performed. Thus, you save time which allows you to concentrate on more important tasks. In the end, maintenance costs are reduced.
Also, the maintenance group could create a list of tasks for each asset so they can easily determine the task needed for each asset.
5. Provide Preventive Maintenance
The proactive nature of preventive maintenance is like it. This means that maintenance is provided to the asset before failure. To ensure that equipment malfunctions are prevented.
When a sudden malfunction occurs, this can lead to increased downtime and costs and work process hinders.
Companies must conduct regular maintenance of assets before an issue becomes worse. This could impact your company’s productivity, your machines’ efficiency, and might require costly repairs in the future.
Suppose you perform regular maintenance for your equipment, this reduces the risk of the unpredictability of your assets and improves their reliability. Through preventive maintenance, you can set the frequency of activities that occur, like each day on a weekly, monthly, or monthly basis, so you can focus on the ones that will really need frequent maintenance.
6. Set Priority of Each Work Order
One of the main Best practices for maintenance planning is prioritizing each task. The maintenance staff must be aware of the importance of every task order to ensure that they follow the requirements.
Suppose the maintenance team does not have the information about Priority. They will then perform their duties according to their given priority. But. This is not profitable for the company. Certain assets are more valuable than others because they help manage a business.
7. Create a Checklist
Making a checklist is essential to the maintenance staff since it aids them in knowing ahead of time what actions need for each asset. It also aids maintenance staff to ensure that they don’t overlook any task that has to be done.
After the activities are done, according to the team, they determine the level of completion or insufficient as indicated on the checklist.
8. Ensure Inventory Availability
A company must track the inventory to ensure efficient maintenance tasks are done. The crew has to replace several components of the asset if they’re not performing to the standards.
Thus, it’s important to track the inventory to ensure it is available before doing maintenance.
Another reason why this is a must so that the maintenance team can prepare beforehand the things needed for a preventive maintenance schedule.
Benefits of Best Practice Planning and Scheduling
To fully grasp how important is employing the best practices of maintenance planning in your company, here are the the benefits you will get:
● Maintenance Technician
Characteristics of a Great Planner
Conclusion
A well-planned maintenance program is essential for the successful operation. When you develop a maintenance plan and a maintenance schedule, an expert in maintenance planning can ensure that machinery and equipment are well-maintained.
This, in turn, results in increased efficiency, lower downtime, and lower repair expenses. If you follow these top practices, manufacturing companies can boost their maintenance plans as well as their productivity.
