The manufacturing industry in Canada spends billions of dollars annually due to unplanned downtime. So many companies find it difficult to benchmark maintenance performance and develop preventive maintenance programs that can generate higher ROI.
While well-thought-out maintenance strategies reduce downtime and minimize repair time, it’s complicated to make the most of your maintenance efforts. This blog post will highlight two constituents of maintenance success that you can focus on to lower your overall production cost and improve productivity.
When it comes to the pursuit of excellence, maintenance departments have to deal with several challenges. If you’re looking to build a successful maintenance program for your facility, you need to identify and prioritize key areas. Some of the maintenance challenges commonly found across industries include:
- Too much unplanned downtime
- Time from request to repair is too long
- Ineffective maintenance metrics
- Poor labor productivity
- Inefficient planning
- Poor insight into equipment and maintenance performance
These challenges seriously affect the performance of a maintenance program. When you adequately address these challenges, your business is likely to experience:
- Optimum system performance
- Reduced downtime
- Improved performance management
- Improved productivity
Let’s take a look at key elements that help industries build a sound maintenance program:
Work order management
Work order systems are at the heart of most maintenance plans. This refers to how a business manages maintenance activities from planning and execution to completion and recordkeeping. What methodology your business should use to manage work orders depends on several factors: the number of technicians, size of operation, goals, etc. A company can consider three major channels to manage maintenance: paper-based systems, spreadsheets, and advanced enterprise asset management systems.
For a small operation, a paper-based approach can work. However, this method makes it more time-consuming to evaluate equipment and maintenance history. Paper-based work order management can lead to labor inefficiencies. Spreadsheets are another commonly used method to manage work. However, spreadsheets are not efficient when it comes to handling work orders for mid-sized or large operations with several assets.
Having a CMMS in place is an efficient approach to solve work order management problems. While the system enables on-demand access to asset and maintenance history, various documentation can also be associated to work orders. Good work order management will provide the following benefits:
- Extended equipment life
- Increased maintenance visibility
- Improved labor efficiency
- Low start to finish maintenance time
- Efficient service request process
Technology
From the internet of things to mobility and analytics, technology is quickly reshaping the way progressive industries maintain their equipment. You can meet your maintenance goals with great ease if you know how to use technology. The application of digital technologies has already been helping companies minimize downtime and reduce operating costs.
However, with so many options, it becomes difficult to know what technology would best fit into your system. There is no specific answer when it comes to selecting the right technologies. For instance, it might not make sense for your plant to use artificial intelligence, but for another facility, it may be the best technology.
Your business must establish its maintenance goals and priorities and then develop a maintenance program accordingly. Since maintenance success is depending on various factors, you need to determine what’s best for your facility.
About Quality Millwright
Quality Millwright takes pride in helping industries in Canada develop and execute effective maintenance programs. As a team of preventive maintenance and downtime experts, we have what it takes to help companies reduce downtime and improve operational efficiency. Contact us for further details!
