Maintenance Control - from Zero to Hero
Six Giant Steps to Effective Maintenance Management

By Bryan D Weir of Perspective CMMS www.pemms.co.uk
Posted 2/21/05

You can just see the eyes of many maintenance managers in many small
companies glaze over at the ment ion of CMMS, RCM, TPM, FMEA and the other
maintenance related acronyms that are often int roduced in discussions on
maintenance and facilit ies management . Big companies often employ some of
these init iat ives in their maintenance organisat ions because they can afford to do
so. The reality for many cash-st rapped, smaller businesses is quite different . Most
of their maintenance is react ive. Plant and equipment problems only get dealt
with as they arise and this is usually when it is too late to avoid the result ing
disrupt ion to their product ion or processes.
Even when a company has both the will and the money to spend, it is difficult to
know where to start when considering the implementat ion of maintenance
management systems. Probably the maj ority of smaller companies are st ill at this
stage, which effect ively means the majority of maintenance people. The prospect
of developing suitable maintenance cont rol st rategies and policies from a standing
start is daunt ing. There are many quest ions such as how much will it cost , where
will the resources come from and how will we cope?
Well, here’s a surprise, the t ruth is that there is not really a lot to it and I would
suggest the following simplified, non-scient ific approach. I won’t show you any
pie charts or fancy graphs and there will be no more three let ter acronyms but it
is a realist ic, effect ive plan and its low cost puts it within the reach of all small
companies.

Step one - Select a low - cost CMMS
This will involve spending some money because your CMMS, (Computerised
Maintenance Management System) , with its equipment register will arguably be
the most important component in this process. The good news is that low cost ,
Access based systems are now available from a couple of hundred pounds/ dollars
upwards. I f you have $1,000 or £600 to spend you should be able to find a single
user system that will more than meet your requirements. I f you need informat ion
on CMMS select ion you will find all you need to know on the Internet . Just search
for something like "CMMS" or "CMMS software select ion" and you will get many
results.

Step two - Develop your equipment register
Maintaining an equipment register - a list of all of your maintainable equipment -
is a necessity. At the lowest level this may only hold details of your equipment
and its locat ion but most CMMS applicat ions provide space to store all sorts of
equipment details. These may include make, model, serial number, equipment
history, linked spares, linked drawings, etc. You can decide for yourself what
informat ion you want to record. I f you are lucky you may already have this on a
spreadsheet or database.
I f you have lots of equipment you may want to consider developing a user
friendly asset numbering system. These are not hard to create, e.g. FAPACK03
could represent the final assembly area (FA) , packaging machine (PACK) number
three. You can develop this to meet your needs.

Step three - develop your first Planned Maintenance ( PM) schedule
Clearly PM schedules are best when they are based on equipment history but you
probably won’t have any history available. I f you don’t have it your past
experience should be able to let you determine which equipment really must be
on your PM schedule. The init ial schedule will therefore be based on your
familiarity with your own equipment but the PM frequencies that you choose
init ially should be considered to be no more than an educated guess. Where
pract ical, you may also want to consider the use of metered maintenance that is
based on runt ime or cycle t ime as opposed to a fixed t ime period.

Step four - Put a good, ad hoc work reporting system in place
Maintenance can be broadly classified as planned or unplanned where unplanned
is breakdown or react ive work. Before a proper maintenance plan is in place the
rat io of unplanned maintenance versus planned maintenance will be high,
perhaps as much as 95% to 5% or even more. Your aim must be to reduce this
rat io to a more sat isfactory level. To do this you must int roduce an effect ive work
request system that captures the details of all ad hoc work that is being done.
One way to do this is to refuse to accept any work requests unless they are
formally requested through the CMMS. The details of these j obs will then be
captured and included in your equipment history.

Step five - Use the maintenance history to fine tune the Schedule
As t ime passes and equipment history starts to be collected in the CMMS system
you can use it to ident ify the equipment whose performance is causing disrupt ion
and downt ime. You can then opt imise the PM work that is taking place in an effort
to minimise this. The CMMS must be capable of producing the specific report s
that can ident ify your improvement areas. For example, if you are in a product ion
environment and reduct ion of downt ime is a problem a downt ime " top ten" report
will be important .

Step six - Move f rom PM rout ines to planned inspect ions.
One of the dangers of int roducing PM rout ines is that after some t ime it can
become generally accepted that they absolutely must be done within the chosen
period. This period was probably chosen by the guesst imate method ment ioned in
step three above and it may not be the opt imum interval. For example a monthly
maintenance rout ine can often be scheduled on plant or machinery that may only
have been used for a week or two during the previous month. PM periodicity is
therefore something that must be reviewed regularly.

You can use your developing equipment history to analyse the PM work that is
taking place and ask yourself what it is achieving. Look at the likely failures that
could occur on the equipment and t ry to put in place inspect ion rout ines to
monitor equipment condit ion

With more t ime, and a greater understanding of the problems that are occurring,
you should be able to drop many of your PM rout ines in favour of planned
maintenance inspect ions. These will give you an indicat ion of when a rout ine
really needs to be car ried out as opposed to doing it blindly, on a calendar based
basis.

The advantage of inspect ions is that many of them can be done quickly, while the
equipment is st ill running (subject of course to normal safety regulat ions.) This is
basic condit ion monitoring or condit ion based maintenance* and even at this
grass root s level it can be very effect ive. I t can be further developed with the use
of low-cost , portable condit ion monitoring tools such as temperature and
vibrat ion measuring equipment .

What does all this cost?
The above scenario is within the reach of almost all maintenance depar tments. At
this stage there is no need to throw money at the problem. You can do it for as
lit t le as £1K but if you can afford £5K you could get yourself a pret ty useful CMMS
system. All you really need is the t ime and the mot ivat ion. I f you do it right you
will end up with more t ime on your hands for analysis and predict ion of problems
as opposed to react ing to them. I f you follow the above rules your returns will be
much greater than your investment .

How long does all this take?
I t cannot be done overnight . There is a significant amount of work involved and it
depends on the resources that you can allocate to it . That said, a small company
could put a CMMS in place in a couple of weeks and if you already have an
equipment register and maintenance procedures this will make it easier .
Gathering equipment history is a different story and it will be a few months
before you have any significant data available. One year down the line you should
be able to measure significant performance improvements.

* Condit ion Monitor ing ( CM) - a maintenance process where the condit ion of equipment is
monitored for ear ly signs of impending failure including overheat ing and changes in vibrat ion pat terns. Equipment can be monitored using sophist icated inst rumentat ion or the human senses. Where inst rumentat ion is used actual limits can be imposed to t r igger maintenance act ivity. Condit ion Monitor ing (CM) , Predict ive Maintenance (PdM) and Condit ion Based Maintenance (CBM) are other terms used to descr ibe this process.
(Definit ion by Bryan Weir of Perspect ive CMMS)

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