Do you know the cost of an hour’s production downtime in your company?
How much time was spent on breakdowns last month or last year?
What maintenance tasks could be done to reduce the number of breakdowns?
It is inevitable, breakdowns in companies happen, and the worst thing is that “breakdowns are expensive”.
To the extent that companies carry out a preventive maintenance plan, also known as industrial maintenance, unforeseen breakdowns are reduced, and the whole company benefits, as we can anticipate problems in a high percentage.
Nowadays it is almost mandatory to have a special attention to the management of assets.
Investments in resources are very significant, and their malfunctioning or inoperability leads to economic losses that can be very critical.
Breakdowns are expensive because they produce:
- Repair costs that include expenses in materials, personnel costs, expenses in subcontracted services…
Damage to machines or installations, which in some cases means that their useful life is shortened. - Loss of production, since on the one hand, the amount of product that has been obtained with defects is lost as a result of a malfunction, and on the other hand, the disorder of the planning when the deliveries are delayed.
But most importantly, poor service if the situation affects customers.
Risks for people. Sometimes there are breakdowns that can lead to very serious accidents.
Carrying out an industrial maintenance plan helps to reduce all these costs, by reducing machine downtime and production subactivity.
In addition, the number of interventions, the hours spent and the costs of corrective maintenance that are caused afterwards to solve the breakdowns are also reduced.
In a previous post we already discussed the types of industrial maintenance that you can read here, now we will talk about the objectives to be achieved.
What are the objectives to achieve with a preventive maintenance plan?
Minimize to the maximum the corrective actions. To intervene with the maintenance before the breakdown occurs, being able to plan the necessary tasks and resources.
Reduce maintenance and repair costs.
- Increase the availability of the machinery, thus increasing its production capacity and obtaining greater profitability.
- Extend the useful life of the equipment, so that it can continue working perfectly for as long as possible without the need to be replaced by new ones.
- Increase the productivity of the machinery and the operator, thus avoiding downtime.
- Avoid the loss of raw material that is unusable due to poor processing in the manufacturing chain.
- Reduce the risk of accidents at work due to broken components.
The implementation of the industrial maintenance module of an ERP is the solution to all these needs, since:
It provides a control of the maintenance actions in each equipment.
Efficiently manages spare parts to ensure their availability
Automates preventive plans to increase efficiency
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Let’s see how to perform a preventive maintenance plan in 3 steps with an ERP system
STEP 1: Determine goals and objectives
The first step to be taken when creating a preventive maintenance plan is to determine exactly what you want to obtain from it.
The main objectives to be achieved in any plan are to minimize the number and time of production stoppages, and to reduce maintenance costs. All this is achieved through proper planning and coordination of the work.
But you have to be more concrete and have more specific and achievable goals, such as
- Increase equipment availability by 60%
- Reduce failures by 70
- Improve labour utilisation by 30%
etc.
STEP 2: Establish a budget
Establishing a budget for preventive maintenance of the company’s assets is done taking into account the frequency recommended by the manufacturer, maintenance costs, revision dates, etc.
Experts in mechanics assure that the correct formula to invest the maintenance budget is: 80% in preventive and only the remaining 20% in failure correction.
STEP 3: Machinery and equipment to be included
Make an inventory of existing equipment. It is important to have a detailed record in the ERP for each of the equipment/machines that can be maintained.
Associated to each equipment will have the spare parts and consumables commonly used in their interventions, as well as any relevant document.
The Documentary Management of the ERP has an important role here, allowing that the card of each machine has documentation about the ISO norm, the homologations, the safety norm, the manual of instructions, etc.
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