Three Ways to Reduce Maintenance Cost

Excessive heat in a manufacturing or warehouse environment has negative effects on workers, production levels and even the quality of produced or stored goods. This is a growing concern because today's North American industries are being pressed hard to match offshore production options. Fortunately there are plant cooling solutions that can solve this problem.

As anyone with a hand in running a household knows, it’s important to keep a stockpile of key items. You certainly don’t want to find out the hard way that you’re on your last square of toilet paper! But in the case of a facility like a power plant, a missing spare part could be more than just a nuisance, it could be downright expensive.

Just in case you or someone you know is experiencing an undesirable work environment, the author shares this brief recap of a maintenance turnaround plan. Warning: Leading a maintenance turnaround is not for the faint of heart. It takes guts, vitamins and a lot of prayers, in addition to a good plan.

The "breakthrough strategy" really works. Equipment becomes more reliable, costs go down, and behaviors change along the way. The key is focusing on results-the kind of results that will get people's attention on the plant floor as well as in the key decision makers' offices. Select the equipment that, if it ran better and was more reliable, would generate sizeable savings. But more importantly, choose equipment that would generate more throughput and revenue.

Digital maps for plants and factories help employees navigate the facility, track assets, and enable inventory audits for better equipment maintenance are in demand.

Technical visionaries often invoke terms like the Internet of Things, smart machines and machine to machine (M2M) to ease our fears about managing the upcoming brain drain that accompanies the graying American industrial workforce. The theory goes that one day, self-learning machines and massively parallel computing may replace the operator. Perhaps, but not in the foreseeable future. That's because smart machines are very good at keeping us from doing dumb things, like stalling a commercial airliner, or pushing a gas compressor beyond safe tolerances. In the realm of black and white, the value of artificial intelligence is unassailable. But what about the rest of the time?

The cost of unreliability is a big picture view of system failure costs, described in annual terms, for a manufacturing plant as if the key elements were reduced to a series block diagram for simplicity.  It looks at the production system and reduces the complexity to a simple series system where failure of a single item/equipment/system/processing-complex causes the loss of productive output along with the total cost incurred for the failure.