Three Ways to Reduce Maintenance Cost

I have received untold phone calls over the past several years, from friends in the industry, explaining that their mill is/was undergoing a ‘re-engineering’ of maintenance. Re-engineering in the broadest sense, including panic payroll reduction. The general theme of that re-engineering effort seems to be elimination of the maintenance department per se. Perhaps, however, behind this change, there is a larger, broader expectation. 

In 1999-2001, the New Jersey International & Bulk Mail Center (NJI&BMC) in Jersey City, one of the largest United States Postal Service facilities, was concerned about its eight 33-year-old motor control centers (MCCs). Events forced a decision to pursue options for replacing or refurbishing the 276 cells that provide power primarily to 58 heating, air conditioning, and ventilation air handling units (HVAC AHUs) for the 1.8-million-sq-ft facility.

Today, maintenance managers find themselves in an ever-evolving environment where technology advances rapidly, and expectations for efficiency and competency continually rise. Maintenance managers will need to possess a wide array of essential skills to stay competitive and ensure the smooth operation of their facilities. In this article, we'll dive into the five crucial skills maintenance managers must have in 2023 to excel in their role.

Effective pump maintenance allows industrial plants to keep pumps operating well, to detect problems in time to schedule repairs, and to avoid early pump failures. Regular maintenance also reveals deteriorations in efficiency and capacity, which can occur long before a pump fails. Wear ring and rotor erosions, for example, can be costly problems that reduce wire-to-water efficiency by 10% or more. The amount of attention given to maintenance depends on how important a system is to a plant’s operations.

The last of the ‘baby boomer’ generation are now retiring from the workplace. As they walk out of the door of your business for the last time, they are taking with them a lifetime's experience from old-school apprenticeship programmes to a lifetime of fault diagnosis and learning in the ‘university of life.’ That experience is what helped your business grow, become successful, and kept your customers happy and returning with repeat orders! So, what can be achieved in the time before valued employees retire for knowledge capture and knowledge transfer so your business can maintain momentum?

The maintenance department is one of the greatest levers of profitability that any capital intensive organisation has. An average of 40 - 50% of a capital intensive industries operating budget is consumed by maintenance expenditure. During the past twenty years the advances in technology available to the maintenance department to manage its processes has delivered the situation where it is within the reach of all maintenance operations to achieve a world class level of maintenance delivery.