Types of Maintenance and Their Relevance
Published on : Saturday 08-05-2021
Maintenance managers must look at different approaches to prevent costly repairs or extended downtime, regardless of the types of maintenance strategies.
Maintenance management is crucial in today’s manufacturing scenario to better meet the demand and supply. Maintenance management cannot be overlooked. The maintenance team significantly makes sure that every finished good or service gets packaged on time. The team strives to find new and better ways to contain and control the cost of doing business. Without maintenance management, delivery of the products or services would be deferred. Wondering why maintenance is important and how to perform it? Get through this article to learn the importance of strategic maintenance management, different types of maintenance and their relevance.
Before diving further, let us first understand what maintenance management really is. Maintenance is all about keeping a piece of equipment in good working condition and following it up with regular or methodological processes to keep the equipment updated. One of the major objectives of equipment maintenance is to maintain the functionality of the equipment while minimising its breakdown. Maintenance management encompasses repair, replacement and serving of tools. It also ensures appropriate working and intercepts fluctuations that occur during the production process.
Thus, it is crucial for manufacturing companies to get and implement an effective maintenance management strategy. If done properly, businesses are able to avoid production loss, rescheduling of whole projects, material wastage, over time of labour because of downtime, and disposal of machinery and equipment before the end of its useful life.
Need for effective maintenance strategy
Maintenance costs represent a high share of operating costs in many industries. Considering reports, operating costs can vary from company to company and industry to industry. But the figure can still sometimes value up to 50% of the global production costs, without even taking into account planned or unplanned downtime, stock and tools management, purchasing, and so on.
Maintenance managers and technicians can help increase the productivity and profit of an organisation by examining their equipment’s status and find information in a tool that helps them envisage potential breakdowns. They often work on minimising unnecessary, unproductive, or counter-productivity. The final aim of maintenance management obviously is to lower the entire plant’s redundant spending while intensifying productivity and profitability.
Types of maintenance and its relevance
It is obvious that having organised and efficient maintenance management is inevitable in today’s industrial environment. Let’s have a look at the different types of maintenance and how companies can get the most of them.
Preventive maintenance
Preventive maintenance typically refers to precautionary action that is taken to catch and fix issues before they appear. In preventive maintenance, the actions are most commonly carried out in the form of regular inspections, usually happening multiple times a year. Maintenance managers and technicians must carefully check for all signs of breakdown when it comes to inspecting a piece of equipment or system. If they find any irregularities, they should replace damaged parts right away. This will prevent certain uncertainties and thwart an organisation from going into crisis mode.
Therefore, preventive maintenance consists of a definite programme of routine inspection, cleaning, and servicing of parts and machines. By implementing this maintenance program, businesses can eliminate unplanned shutdown time as they will ideally catch problems before they befall.
Condition-based maintenance
Condition-based maintenance considers the more advanced alternative to preventive maintenance. In this maintenance program, operators and technicians carefully observe for changes that could emphasise upcoming failure. It means maintenance can only be performed when certain indicators highlight signs of reducing performance or upcoming failure, rather than being inspected according to a schedule. Inspecting a machine or equipment for these indicators may involve non-invasive measurements, visual inspection, performance data and scheduled tests. Condition-based maintenance can be used for mission-critical and non-mission-critical assets.
Thus, in condition-based maintenance, technicians usually observe the system running and detect variables that could affect functioning, such as temperature, power, vibration speed, the presence or absence of moisture, and more.
Predictive maintenance
Predictive maintenance is considered to be the most advanced type of maintenance. With this maintenance, technicians typically monitor the performance and condition of equipment during normal operation to avoid the likelihood of failures. Often referred to as condition-based maintenance, predictive maintenance has been in the industrial world since the 1990s. According to Control Engineering, “The start of predictive maintenance (PdM) may have been when a mechanic first put his ear to the handle of a screwdriver, touched the other end to a machine, and pronounced that it sounded like a bearing was going bad.”
The main goal of predictive maintenance is to predict when equipment failure could occur based on certain factors. In predictive maintenance, systems are regularly observed via sensor devices. These devices are connected to components of the system and feed constant, real-time data to software. The software then construes the data and alerts maintenance technicians of approaching danger.
Corrective maintenance
Corrective maintenance, also referred to as repair maintenance, is concerned with removing production bottlenecks by timely repairs or replacement of worn-out parts. The maintenance is begun when a problem is found while working on another work order. Corrective maintenance helps find issues just in time. One of the purposes of corrective maintenance is to restore systems that have broken down. Corrective maintenance may be performed on various equipment, systems, and processes, including production line, HVAC systems, and public works.
Corrective maintenance significantly eliminates emergency maintenance orders, intensifies employee safety, and reduces service interruptions. It also extends asset lifetime and optimises resource planning while dwindling downtime.
Predetermined maintenance
Unlike other maintenance types, predetermined maintenance is probably less known in the industrial world. This maintenance doesn’t rely on the actual equipment’s state and is carried out using rules and suggestions delivered by original manufacturers rather than the maintenance team. These suggestions are usually created based on experiments and collected data. A manufacturer provides statistics and guidelines when the equipment is first purchased. Then they will include data providing the average lifespan of both the entire system and its various parts. The manufacturer will also suggest how often parts should be inspected, serviced and replaced.
Predetermined maintenance is imperfect as it doesn’t guarantee that a piece of equipment won’t break down since the programs are based on statistics and not take the equipment’s actual state into account.
Conclusion
If you are looking to make the most of maintenance management and want to avoid uncertain downtime and equipment failures, try at least one maintenance type to improve productivity. You as a maintenance manager must look at different approaches to prevent costly repairs or extended downtime, regardless of the types of maintenance strategies your team utilises.
