Every company must have a stringent maintenance strategy in place — it holds truer for asset-intensive businesses, for achieving efficiency and higher profits. The maintenance strategy that you employ in the facility will have a tremendous impact on the company’s bottom line. Unfortunately, quite a few maintenance managers have a difficult time choosing the appropriate strategy, or worse, they completely overlook the approach altogether.
It is important to have Enterprise Asset Management software in place while implementing a strategy to track your work and schedule. The three basic types of maintenance strategies are Preventive, Reactive and Predictive. Choose the one that works best for the assets in question.
Do not wait until a component fails to take the necessary action to repair or replace it. All assets require periodic maintenance to continue running efficiently, which is why it is critical that you find the appropriate balance of maintenance approaches to minimize asset downtime and repair costs while maintaining a safe environment for workers.
Let us learn more about the three maintenance strategies.
Preventive Maintenance
This strategy aims at conducting maintenance before any breakdown occurs. Preventive maintenance is either a time-based or meter count-based approach which is carried out at predetermined intervals to reduce failure risk or performance degradation of assets.
The objective of preventive maintenance is to minimize unplanned downtime and reduce repair costs. However, it is important to remember that preventive maintenance cannot always prevent asset failure.
Reactive Maintenance
Also referred to as the run-to-failure strategy, reactive maintenance is when you take action after an asset fails. This strategy might appear to be a cheaper option as you would be spending money only when something breaks down, however, it proves to be a costly affair in the long run.
The life of the assets gets shortened if you employ only reactive maintenance. The assets may break down more frequently as well. When you are in reactive maintenance mode, most of your daily maintenance activities are driven by unforeseen problems.
Predictive Maintenance
Predictive maintenance is a condition-based approach to maintenance. This focuses on evaluating the condition of the components to determine whether they need to be serviced instead of servicing the assets on a fixed schedule.
This would be best suited to the largest, most expensive, and most complex assets in the facility. Combined with preventive maintenance would give the best results. Some examples of this strategy include oil analysis, thermal analysis, and vibration analysis.
Tips for Optimizing Your Maintenance Strategy
When you optimize the maintenance strategy of your facility along with Enterprise Asset Management, you would enjoy a number of benefits, some of which include — extended asset life, reduced downtime and asset failure, improved health and safety, and minimize repair costs. Here are some tips to optimize the maintenance strategy.
First, assess the current maintenance strategy to identify its strengths and weaknesses. Once that is done, assign a maintenance strategy to each asset in the facility based on its level of criticality.
– Assets with a high consequence of failure are considered as highly critical assets. You must monitor the condition of these assets continuously with a predictive maintenance plan to protect them and predict failures.
– Assets of low — to mid-level criticality should be monitored with preventive
maintenance.
– Use reactive maintenance for assets that are not considered essential. It must be noted that you must use reactive maintenance only if the consequence of failure is so low that it makes sense to allow the asset to fail rather than spend valuable maintenance time performing predictive or preventive maintenance tasks.
You can use a combination of all three maintenance strategies for the best results. Document the condition of the assets using EAM over time as it will enable you to identify opportunities for improvement and increase efficiency. NEXGEN Asset Management is the right place to come if you are looking to implement EAM in your facility and understand how it would affect your maintenance strategies.
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