The Maintenance Storeroom: Keys to Efficient Maintenance Operation

While off-line filtering and particle analysis were key to Smoky Canyon Mine’s reliability improvements, the mine’s reliability team found that these techniques did not do enough to warn about catastrophic failures in the mine’s fleet of 785 Caterpillar haul trucks. Therefore, the team decided to include magnetic plug inspections in the 500-hour interval inspections. Smoky Canyon Mine’s magnetic plug inspections have raised its reliability maintenance program beyond contamination control to the next level.

Daily and weekly meetings between operations and maintenance are crucial in taking the efficiency of your daily maintenance to a higher level. Coordinating meetings where various departments prioritize work orders (WO) and maintenance is the foundation for a partnership between operations and maintenance. Such meetings create efficiency. Well-organized meetings with clear goals and agendas can completely change the culture for the better in an organization.

I am from an automotive parts supplier in mid-western United States. Implementing TPM in a company is not easy. The philosophies of TPM are not that difficult to understand but are a some what difficult task to implement.

The concept of Best Practice is easy to describe and discuss – the more difficult part is determining your path towards reliability and maintenance Best Practice and more importantly, sustaining standards and developing a continuous improvement culture.

Managing your inventory levels correctly can mean the difference between machinery that has broken down and is slowing down the assembly line or a smoothly running machine that is boosting productivity. In today’s competitive industry, no company can afford downtimes and delays in production due to missing parts. With increased competition, companies depend on their supply chain to be leaner, healthier and faster than the competition. The thing to remember about inventory control is that it’s about striking a balance between too much stock and too little. If you have too many tools and spare parts on hand, you’re wasting company funds that could be better utilized elsewhere.

Big changes are happening in today’s workforce. These changes have nothing to do with downsizing, global competition, or stress; it is the problem of a distinct generation gap. Young people entering the workforce are of diversified background and have much different attitudes about work. They want a life‐work balance. They want to be led, not managed — and certainly not micro‐managed. The new mode is flexibility and informality. A large proportion of our managers of the veteran era have been trained in relatively autocratic and directive methods that don’t sit well with today’s employees. Are we preparing our workforce to meet tomorrow’s need?

In the world of production, the heartbeat of success lies in the delicate balance between keeping equipment running (continuous operation) and diving into the intricacies of troubleshooting for root causes. This dichotomy is the confluence of two distinct yet complementary approaches, each pivotal in its own right for maintaining efficiency and sustaining operations within industrial settings.