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SUBJECT: Preventive Maintenance (Production Systems)

ALPHANUMERIC IDENTIFIER:

BRIEF DESCRIPTION: Preventive maintenance programs involve many tasks and span across the corporation, however, companies must weight the costs against the benefits to determine the need for a PM program plan and implementation.

KEYWORDS: Preventive Maintenance, Plant Maintenance, Facilities Maintenance, Asset Management, Predictive Maintenance

OVERVIEW:

The traditional preventive maintenance program integrates elements of the following:

• scheduling employees and work orders
• purchasing
• corrective maintenance
• inventory control
• project work

Preventive maintenance managers are responsible for serving their internal customers and reducing the downtime and breakdown of production equipment. Many world class organizations have preventive maintenance personnel that handle everything from landscaping to scheduled maintenance of multi-million dollar assets in all parts of the company.

Increasingly, preventive maintenance programs are collaborating with different parts of the traditional organization. Cross-functional teams consisting of engineering, machine and tool design, manufacturing, and purchasing now engage in an information exchange that focuses on the cause rather than the symptoms of operating problems. For example,

"A maintenance staff team member notices excessive problems with air filters. After meeting with his maintenance team leader, it is determined that the filters were averaging 1.5 years of mean time between failure (MTBF) and that repair kits cost $45 plus labor and downtime. This information was forwarded to members in manufacturing and purchasing, while inspections were increased to once per week. As costs began to rise because of people and time demands from the new air filter maintenance schedule, a member from the machine and tool design group informed purchasing about a new air filter recently seen at a conference that had a MTBF of 6 years without PM and cost $75. The filters were tested and phased in, leaving maintenance personnel to work on other, more important equipment."

This shows how the new trend in preventive maintenance is to eventually eliminate the need for maintenance. Enhanced information exchange and scheduling are some of the current trends in preventive maintenance. Computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS’s) enable management to schedule work orders, participate in electronic data interchange with suppliers, maximize human resources, and share data with other departments.

Many organizations use preventive maintenance to reduce long run costs. One study by the Michigan Department of Transportation showed that a preventive maintenance program that was started in 1992 at a cost of $80 million has been a tremendous success. The study determined that had the DOT not implemented the strategy, it would have spent over $700 million in rehabilitative and reconstruction projects, nearly 9 times the cost of the original PM project.

These types of cost savings are common with effective preventive maintenance programs, but companies must evaluate the mission-critical condition of production equipment and their tolerance for downtime and breakdowns. For example, newspaper companies are much less tolerant of breakdowns than air conditioning manufacturers. Managers must ask the following questions to determine whether a preventive maintenance program is feasible:

1. How mission critical are my production systems and can I tolerate breakdowns?
2. What are the costs related to a preventive maintenance program?

• People
• CMMS
• Training
• Inventory

3. What are the savings from an effective implementation of a PM program?

These questions and calculations will help management determine whether the PM program can add value to the operation, or whether the service should be outsourced in this age of down-sizing.

REFERENCES

1. Federal Highway Administration, U.S. Department of Transportation, September 23, 1997.
2. Preventive Maintenance, Joseph D. Patton Jr., 2^nd Edition, January 1995.
3. Glossary of Reliability and Maintenance Terms, Ted McKenna & Ray Oliverson, August 1997.
4. Uptime; Strategies for Excellence in Maintenance Management, John Dixon Campbell, January 1995.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT: This is a March 29, 1999 revision by Gene Goodson of an assignment for OM742 contributed by Manuel Valencia.