Smart Shutdowns: Avoid Costly Mistakes with Your Outages

Priority, as defined in the Franklin Dictionary, means "coming before in time, order, or importance." When prioritizing maintenance work, one must consider its importance to the entire company in question. My experience shows that, in the real world of most maintenance departments, you can classify priorities in two groups: Emotional priorities and real priorities.

A few weeks ago, someone asked me, “How many hours should a planner plan for each week?” This is a great question, but I can only give a touchy-feely answer. A strict numerical approach to productivity might miss the point of why planners exist (to promote crew productivity). I want the planner to keep the unplanned backlog under control by adjusting the time spent on the level of detail put into each job plan.

No other element of the technical database provides as much value to planning as an accurate bill of materials. Bills of material are a list of parts that are used on the equipment. When developing BOMs, focus on parts used for routine maintenance, repair, and operation of the equipment. Individual parts should contain a minimum amount of information including: a consistent and organized name, manufacturer and their item number, price, lead time, and quantity needed for the equipment.

Few tools are as useful to managing the maintenance workload and effectiveness as the Maintenance Backlog. In many companies today management of the maintenance backlog has been neglected. As a result they are generally drowning in their own data. A poorly managed system has a dramatic effect on the entire delivery of maintenance services.

Planned maintenance is a maintenance concept developed over a span of time, and is made up of numerous functions, all designed to compliment each other. Planned maintenance, then, is a maintenance program designed to improve the effectiveness of maintenance through the use of systematic methods and plans. The primary objective of the maintenance effort is to keep equipment functioning in a safe and efficient manner. This allows production to meet production targets with minimum operating cost.

Manufacturing facilities know downtime is money.  Every hour you are offline for a shutdown is costly from both lost revenue and cost of the workforce employed to maintain the facility. This article will discuss the 5 steps to Best Practices that will optimize your shutdown program.

Equipment hierarchy is the foundation on which the technical database is built. Since the technical database is a key element in allowing efficient planning and scheduling, the equipment hierarchy is a building block of the entire work management system. Nearly every business unit from accounting to purchasing and from operations to maintenance will benefit from a well-organized and complete equipment hierarchy.