Month: July 2019

What is Accountability in Maintenance Management?

When you hear the word accountability, what do you feel? Fear? Stress? Usually when we hear this word, it’s in reaction to a negative situation – something went wrong and someone will be blamed for the event. You might say that a person must be held accountable for his/her actions, suggesting that there should be some punishment. Due to this association, moving towards a culture of accountability can be challenging.

With that said, it is important to remember that “accountability” is not the same as “blame.” Accountability is being responsible for one’s own actions and the results of those actions, both good and bad. For maintenance managers, the goal of creating a culture of accountability is to improve maintenance processes, not to assign blame. Accountability is a forward-thinking strategy. Your team is made up of problem solvers. Every failure is an opportunity to learn from what went wrong and what could be done to improve the situation or to prevent it from happening in the future.

Creating a Culture of Accountability

Accountability starts with communication. Maintenance managers must help technicians understand what is expected of them, to what standard work will be held, and what deadlines must be met. They also have an obligation to monitor the processes put in place and ensure that procedures are being followed. Being able to express concerns and accept feedback also plays an important role in strengthening communication and maintaining accountability.

The idea of accountability sounds really good on paper, but how does it play out on the plant floor? After all, there’s only one of you – you can’t watch what every person is doing every minute of every day. How can you ensure that your staff members are personally invested in developing and maintaining a culture of accountability? How can you make sure that maintenance is being performed correctly? How can you make sure that employees are staying productive? How will technicians know the specifications for each asset?

One thing you can do is provide tools, like computerized maintenance management software (CMMS), for you and your staff that documents, tracks, and communicates your maintenance process along with detailed feedback on the maintenance performance of your staff.

How a CMMS Improves Accountability

Without a system in place for communicating maintenance requirements and performance expectations, it is difficult for anyone to be accountable for their work. There is no record that can be referenced when there are miscommunications and misunderstandings about a particular job or task. A CMMS helps foster communication by documenting and storing information about your maintenance assets. The following are a few ways in which a CMMS can help improve accountability.

Work Order Tracking

A CMMS helps you create detail-rich work orders and provides you with full visibility of work being done. Using work order software to generate work orders makes it easy to communicate necessary details such as who is responsible for the work, what materials are needed to complete the job, and when the work must be completed. You can also use the CMMS to quickly check the status of work orders and follow up on any tasks that are incomplete or overdue. The work order itself then becomes the reference point for both maintenance manager and technician to discuss.

Preventive Maintenance

Preventive maintenance (PM) procedures must be closely followed in order to keep equipment functioning. Because the consequences that may occur from skipped or missed preventive maintenance can be quite serious, it is important that all team members are held accountable for their timely and accurate completion. Preventive maintenance software, like CMMS, can be just the tool you need to keep your team accountable.

Scheduling PMs for a handful of assets may not be much of a problem, but most companies maintain hundreds – if not thousands – of pieces of equipment. Without CMMS, keeping track of these schedules is nearly impossible. Automated work order generation, distribution, and notification ensure that preventive maintenance assignments are not missed or forgotten.

CMMS also helps you standardize PM activities through the use of tasks. Detailed tasks lists communicate your expectations for the work while also serving the purpose of providing step-by-step instructions for technicians to follow. In general, task lists will spell out what must be done, how it should be done, what guidelines or specifications must be met, and approximately how long a task should take. Because they follow the same procedure each and every time, it becomes easy to tell when PMs fall below expectations and where additional training might be needed. This performance evaluation data is most clearly revealed in reports, which are discussed later.

Notifications

Notifications automate communication about the status of your maintenance activities, helping to ensure that work is not forgotten, lost, or miscommunicated. When a maintenance request or work order is created in CMMS software, notifications can be sent to the right people, letting them know that a new job is waiting.

A CMMS can also be used to implement an approval process for work order closure. As part of this process, notifications can inform a superior that a work order is ready for approval or let someone else know that approval has been given. Securing the approval of others helps facilitate a system of checks and balances that ensures maintenance work is meeting expectations.

Mobility

A mobile CMMS empowers your staff to use maintenance software from the field. With more access to your maintenance management software, technicians are more likely to report issues on the spot, track tasks and time as they go, and stay productive. CMMS software that includes GPS or GIS functionality can also help you keep track of where employees and assets are located.

Reports and Dashboards

Maintenance reports and dashboards are vital tools for holding your team accountable for its performance. Maintenance management reports help you track productivity, work completion rates, maintenance costs, and more. Dashboards graphically display key performance indicators (KPIs), allowing you to monitor operations at a glance. Analyzing the metrics provided by a CMMS helps you identify areas of improvement, which can be reviewed with your team.

Improve Accountability at Your Facility

Accountability should not be considered a bad word. It is a shared responsibility between team members that can foster more collaboration and accuracy, thereby improving maintenance operations and morale. But creating a culture of accountability requires the right tools. FTMaintenance provides a single platform for managing, documenting, and tracking maintenance activities. Request a demo of FTMaintenance to discover how our maintenance management software can help improve accountability.

Even if you don’t call it by this name, you may already be familiar with the concept of corrective maintenance in your daily life. If the dryer breaks, you fix or replace it. If windows are dirty, you clean them. If the color of your siding is fading, you paint it.

When this concept is applied to the industrial workplace, there’s a little more to it. Machine breakdowns require investigation to identify the issue and make a decision as to whether a part should be repaired or replaced. Components are cleaned so that assets can perform at their highest capacity. General upkeep is done to keep environments safe and secure.

You know that preventive maintenance is used to prevent breakdowns before they happen, so where does corrective maintenance fit into the big picture?

Read Blog Post: What is Preventive Maintenance?

Corrective Maintenance Definition

Corrective maintenance (CM) is a maintenance task performed to restore a non- or under-performing asset to an optimum or operational condition. This corrective maintenance definition may mean different things, depending on your organization or industry.

For example, corrective maintenance in equipment-centric businesses may be the repair or replacement of a part that has worn down. Companies that deal primarily with non-equipment assets, such as facilities or property, might consider mowing the lawn to be CM.

The need for corrective action may be discovered in many ways. A maintenance technician may notice a degrading part while performing a preventive maintenance job like an inspection. A machine operator may alert the maintenance team that equipment is not functioning as expected. Seasonal weather may dictate the need for corrective maintenance, such as when a parking lot must be plowed after a snow storm.

Types of Corrective Maintenance

CM can be broken down into smaller categories: scheduled and unscheduled.

• Scheduled corrective maintenance: Maintenance that is needed, but not required to be performed immediately.
• Unscheduled corrective maintenance: Maintenance that is required due to a critical failure that must be corrected without delay.

Corrective Maintenance Examples

The following examples are based on the types of corrective maintenance listed above:

• A spray nozzle becomes clogged causing lubricant to stop flowing through the nozzle. A work order is created to clear the blockage or replace the nozzle head at the time of the next inspection (scheduled corrective maintenance).
• Mineral build-up from hard water collects in a pipe, increasing the pressure and causing it to burst. The pipe must be replaced as soon as possible (unscheduled corrective maintenance).

Advantages of Corrective Maintenance

When used as part of a larger maintenance strategy, corrective maintenance can provide multiple benefits.

• Less Planning Required: Although some corrective maintenance activities must still be planned, compared to preventive maintenance schedules, there is less planning involved.
• Simplified Process: CM is need-based, allowing the maintenance team to focus on other tasks, such as preventive maintenance, until a breakdown or adverse condition occurs.
• More Appropriate in Some Cases: Corrective maintenance can save money because you don’t need to repair or replace an asset until maintenance is truly needed. For example, it is more cost-effective to replace a light bulb when it burns out than to spend time, money, and effort creating a preventive maintenance plan.

Disadvantages of Corrective Maintenance

Relying solely on CM without the benefit of a preventive maintenance strategy can have significant shortcomings.

• Increased Downtime: When serious problems arise, maintenance can be a slow and expensive process. Periods of equipment downtime affect production, costing the organization money.
• Higher Maintenance Costs: Without preventive maintenance, the condition of assets can deteriorate more significantly before problems are discovered, requiring the repair or replacement of more parts while also increasing labor costs.
• Safety Issues: When performed in response to a breakdown where money is being lost every second, maintenance may be rushed, leading to a higher risk of unsafe or improper work.
• Unpredictability: When emergencies happen, all other maintenance work is put on hold until the problem is resolved, leading to a backlog of work orders. Maintenance managers must also quickly identify the technicians and parts needed to address the repair.

When to Use Corrective Maintenance

Corrective maintenance is unavoidable. Every maintenance team performs some form of maintenance in response to equipment breakdowns and failures. But as we’ve stated, relying too heavily on CM can negatively impact operations. So when should you use corrective maintenance over other types of maintenance, such as preventive maintenance?

The decision can depend on many things, such as the cost of downtime, your assets’ reliability, and whether assets can be easily swapped if problems occur. Your company may also conduct a cost-benefits analysis on your assets to help support the case for scheduled corrective maintenance. Experts recommend that your balance of corrective vs. preventive maintenance should be 80/20. That is, 80% of maintenance should be preventive, while the remaining 20% should be corrective maintenance.

How CMMS Software Helps

The goal of every maintenance team is to reduce asset downtime. A computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) like FTMaintenance stores information about corrective maintenance activities and automatically builds a maintenance history. During critical corrective maintenance tasks, it also allows technicians to quickly check an asset’s service history, speeding up troubleshooting and repairs. Corrective maintenance data can be analyzed to identify trends, spawning future preventive maintenance that will help avert future failure. Learn more about all the CMMS features FTMaintenance has to offer.

What is Preventive Maintenance?

Preventive maintenance (PM), sometimes called preventative maintenance, is maintenance that is proactively performed on an asset with the goal of lessening the likelihood of failure, reducing unexpected downtime, and prolonging its useful life.

In practice, this means regularly checking equipment for small problems and fixing them before failure can occur. Preventive maintenance activities may consist of inspections, calibrations, lubrications, adjustments, cleaning, or part replacements. As preventive maintenance activities are performed, workers also document an asset’s condition so they know when future maintenance may be needed.

Why Is PM Important?

Imagine what would happen if you waited until your car’s engine failed before you got an oil change. Each time this occurs, you would have to pay for an emergency tow truck to take it to a repair shop where the engine can be fixed. That’s if there is no catastrophic damage. Otherwise, you must source a rebuilt engine (usually thousands of dollars) and install it. Meanwhile, you must also find an alternate mode of transportation.

Clearly, waiting for your engine to fail is not only inconvenient, but also costly in terms of money and time. It would be much easier to try to prevent the breakdown before it happens. This same logic applies to the equipment and assets you work with every day.

Types of Preventive Maintenance

Preventive maintenance can take many forms. The two most common are:

• Calendar-based preventive maintenance: Maintenance activities are scheduled based on a specific date, or a time interval such as number of days.
• Runtime-based preventive maintenance: Maintenance activities are scheduled based on a specific measured runtime unit, such as miles, hours, or level.

Based on our definition above, the following may also be categorized as types of preventive maintenance:

• Condition-based maintenance (CbM): Maintenance is scheduled when a monitored condition characteristic of an asset’s normal operation, such as temperature, vibration, pressure, meter readings, etc., is out of its normal measured range.
• Predictive maintenance (PdM): Maintenance is scheduled by analyzing real-time equipment data and data from previous breakdowns.

Preventive Maintenance Examples

The following are examples of preventive maintenance examples, based on the types defined earlier in this article.

• A work order for cleaning the gutters is created every 6 months (calendar-based).
• An oil change work order is assigned to a technician after every 5,000 miles traveled by a fleet vehicle (runtime-based).
• An equipment sensor shows that a shaft is vibrating beyond normal limits. A work order is created with instructions to inspect, and potentially replace, the bearings (condition-based maintenance).
• After analyzing real-time and historical maintenance data, an analyst concludes that a machine will likely fail after running for 1,000 hours. A work order is created to inspect a subassembly after 950 more hours of runtime (predictive maintenance).

Advantages and Disadvantages of Preventive Maintenance

Advantages

There are a number of advantages of preventive maintenance compared to other types of maintenance, such as corrective maintenance (CM).

• Better Preparation for Maintenance Work: Since maintenance activities can be planned ahead of time, you can efficiently coordinate any required parts, supplies, and labor resources before work is due.
• Improved Scheduling: PM activities can be scheduled to fit into the production schedule or during planned plant shutdowns.
• Lower Overall Maintenance Costs: Unplanned maintenance is often more expensive due to excessive downtime, loss of production, and expedited shipping fees. The cost of preventive maintenance activities is more controlled. In fact, companies typically save 12-18% on total maintenance costs using preventive maintenance.

Disadvantages

Preventive maintenance is an important part of every maintenance strategy. However, preventive maintenance does have some limitations.

• More Time Needed to Plan: Designing a PM plan takes time, effort, and ability. This project requires dedicated resources, which may not always be readily available.
• Increased Costs from Excessive Maintenance: Performing maintenance on equipment that doesn’t need it leads to unnecessary downtime, labor costs, and part usage. Additionally, incorrect re-assembly, misalignment, or other errors caused by nonessential interactions can actually reduce the reliability of your assets.
• More Maintenance Resources are Required: Preventive maintenance requires additional workers, parts, and budget to implement correctly. However, the long-term benefits you will receive will far outweigh this requirement.

When to Use Preventive Maintenance

Even with all its benefits, it may not always be clear when to use preventive maintenance. Ideally, you’ll want to use it to extend the lifespan of all your assets, but if you’re just getting started, you need to prioritize.

At a minimum, preventive maintenance should be applied to assets that are critical to production, where their ability to perform their job is of high importance. From there, you can expand your plan to include non-critical equipment and facilities.

Using a PM program can also better organize the activities of the maintenance department. Carefully thinking through your maintenance operations helps you better forecast the demand for maintenance resources and make it easier to balance the work load. The creation of standardized PM task lists will ensure that all employees are performing work in the same way. Also, using a preventive maintenance plan as a guide keeps the team on task and makes sure that maintenance is being done when it’s needed.

How Preventive Maintenance Software Helps

Preventive maintenance simplifies and standardizes complex maintenance processes. However, because PMs will likely be performed on a large number of assets, it is nearly impossible to effectively track everything manually. Preventive maintenance software, like FTMaintenance computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) software, stores all of your maintenance data in one place so you can easily keep track of all your PM activities.