Maintenance Breakdown

Why Bother with Planned Maintenance

Is downtime getting you down? Are you having breakdown nightmares?

With to-days technology and devices that enable us to predict and forecast machine failures, why should we still be having breakdown nightmares?

The answer of course is reasonably straightforward. No matter how sophisticated the technology is, all technology needs information before it can process anything. That is where things start to fall to pieces. The lack of correctly gathered and processed information is where our nightmares start.

But of course, to fill that information gap, we need more than just information, we need a system to help us to gather, collate, store and access that information in an easy and informative manner. This is why we need a planned maintenance management system, which has its roots in a DataBase Information Management System.

This is the database that forms the foundation stone for your maintenance management system as it holds all key information and technical details for your plant and machinery assets, together with maintenance schedules and technical specifications.

Technology needs information and it is your Maintenance Management System that collects that information through job procedures, work orders, and technical instrumentation.

We have moved from the Industrial Age to the Information Age, which impacts every aspect of our lives, industry, businesses, and jobs, and today we should not need to live with breakdown nightmares.

Breakdown Nightmares

• Is downtime getting you down?
• Are you having breakdown nightmares?
• Do you seem to have an ongoing issue with unreliable equipment and frequent breakdowns? 
• Do you have excessive emergency call-outs with an uncontrolled budget, just watching your dollars fly out of the window?

The reality is that a combination of all these things will be having a hugely significant impact on bottom-line company profitability, as well as a demoralizing effect on workers and technicians.

How can we turn this around?

How can we turn this around from a firefighting status to a controlled environment where world-class standards are being achieved? Wouldn’t you like to have a maintenance operation where assets are available, reliable, operating in a safe efficient environment with an improved image, and where operating and maintenance costs are controlled and kept at a minimum?

Maintenance management is all about maintaining the resources of the company so that production proceeds effectively and that no money is wasted on inefficiency. Welcome to the start of your journey towards a World Class Maintenance Facility.

Reactive and Proactive Maintenance

So where do we start?

Are you having sleepless nights with yet another energy-sapping breakdown nightmare to resolve? Can I get through tomorrow without another breakdown issue raising its head?

There are two big factors to consider before we move further forward. We need to ask ourselves ‘are we in a Reactive or Proactive Maintenance environment’?

Dentistry

I thought you may enjoy a smile and a chuckle from some of these old images about dentistry.

What about that first sign, dentistry painless, extractions, and dentures. It certainly doesn’t look painless in the next image and in the third image, it looks as if the patient is trying to escape.

Good maintenance should not be like pulling teeth. Thank goodness dentistry is a little more sophisticated today but even now a trip to the dentist is not something that many people look forward to.

As you can see at the bottom of the image, good maintenance requires cooperation and the right tools with them being used the right way, otherwise, the result will be painful, inaccurate, and will require expensive repairs in the future.

Plant and Facilities

Plant and Facilities cannot run trouble-free forever.

The main issue of course is if we are dealing with excessive downtimes as a result of constant breakdowns, then what can we do about it?

We have the following two options:

a) We can be Reactive, fix when needed (Back to the painful dentistry)

b) Or we can be Proactive, by planning

As we can see here the dentist is showing his plans to the patient, part of which will be regular checkups to maintain the teeth correctly and to identify potential issues before they happen and cause painful problems, which will require some emergency work. 

This highlights the fact that we need to have a plan in place to keep our machines in good health in order to minimize the frequency and impact of any breakdowns.

So let’s ask the questions again:

• Is downtime getting you down?

• Are you having trouble sleeping at night fighting with your breakdown nightmares?

Unless you are feeding and enjoying your nightmares, the first step you must take to get out of this situation is to formulate a plan of action to move to a Proactive environment with the help of a proven Maintenance Management Information based system.

Welcome to the start of your journey towards a World Class Maintenance Facility.

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