How can maintenance optimization improve safety and reliability of your assets?

Maintenance optimization plays a crucial role in any organization's efforts to reduce costs and improve overall operational efficiency. By focusing on prevention rather than repair, businesses can proactively identify and address potential issues before they escalate into major problems. This proactive approach not only helps to minimize downtime and improve productivity but also significantly reduces the overall maintenance costs. Selection of the best maintenance strategy that suits the business model plays a huge role in the success of maintenance optimization and improvement.

In my experience I always lean in one direction: “data never lies”. Many organizations disregard the data which leads to major failures not being tracked and the impact not being measured. With the array of tools available to maintenance professionals now, I know it’s much easier to do this. Linking your CMMS software with the data capture sensors / analysis reports from oil, vibration and thermography can help optimize your maintenance schedule.

Maintenance optimization plays a crucial role in improving the safety and reliability of assets in Facility Management. Here’s how: 1. Proactive Maintenance Planning: By optimizing maintenance schedules, facilities can conduct proactive maintenance tasks before assets fail or become unsafe. This reduces the likelihood of unexpected breakdowns or safety hazards. 2. Risk-Based Maintenance: Prioritizing maintenance activities based on risk assessment allows facilities to focus resources on critical assets with the highest safety and reliability implications. This approach ensures that essential equipment receives the attention it needs to operate safely and reliably.

Em minha visão a diferença está na melhoria contínua, olhar pró-ativo e visão de prevenção. Hoje em dia vejo as equipes de manutenção muito focadas em solucionar problemas do passado e pouco pensamento no futuro. Uma forte visão de negócio também auxilia bastante, precisamos cada vez mais enxergar o custo de manter vs o retorno de um investimento e/ou renovação de um ativo.

Uma das perguntas desse tópico diz respeito ao resultado da “boa” manutenção em relação à segurança. Não há dúvidas que em um ambiente onde a manutenção funciona bem, existem menos quebras inesperadas, e é senso comum que o risco aumenta em atividades não planejadas, e sob pressão (nesse caso pressão pra retornar a produção). Melhore a gestão dos seus ativos, e verá a segurança melhorando também.

It needs to optimize and improve the maintenance plan to increase the asset reliability and to reduce the cost for the maintenance. In most of the cases, it needs to have a planned downtime for performing the maintenance activities. Further this associated with a cost and resource utilization. Therefore improving the existing maintenance strategy will improve resource availability, asset availability for the operation while reducing the maintenance cost. Another one of the cost component relevant to the maintenance is inventory cost and improving the maintenance strategy will help to optimize the inventory and reduce the inventory cost.

Optimizing maintenance goes through management control. Prevent the deterioration of equipment and facilities, ensure their proper operation, schedule replacement during their estimated life cycle, monitor and control the risks generated by the use of said assets and mitigate or eliminate unsafe conditions generated by the use of these assets, are part of optimal maintenance management actions that undoubtedly improve the #safety, #reliability and of course the PROFITABILITY of the business.

Maintenance managment must be continuous improvement. It`s necesary reducing costs, improve facilities peformance and risk managment generates during operations to acomplish organization`s objectives and be competitive.

Optimizing maintenance is crucial for boosting the safety and reliability of your assets. By focusing on preventive maintenance, you can spot and fix issues before they turn into serious problems. Take Delta Airlines, for instance—they use predictive analytics to plan maintenance based on how much their equipment is actually used, not just set time intervals. This approach prevents unexpected breakdowns and helps extend the life of their machinery. Regular maintenance checks also ensure that all safety standards are met, dramatically reducing the risk of accidents. Not only does this keep your assets in top shape, but it also minimizes downtime and boosts your bottom line.

Some great examples are reducing the frequency of oil changes based on spectrographic analysis, extending bearing life based on vibration analysis and advancing injector changes based on exhaust scatters to prevent major defects down the line. Of course this is all a waste of resource, time and money unless your organisation acts on the advice of your CBM experts and your gathered data. Worse, it creates animosity and an "I told you so" resentment amongst your engineers when things do break!

To optimize maintenance, you should use a suitable method to gain an overview of critical assets/machines in order to then apply the required maintenance strategy. I prefer the SPoF analysis to display the assets/machines and the risk matrix as a decision-making aid for the required strategy mix.

To implement optimizeed maintenance plan, you suppos to have maintenance plan exist first, as silly this phrase maybe but unfortunately most of the organization's jumps to optimization without going through the rationalisation phase, to optimize anything you should have the basis first in order to have foundation soild enough, with that said first optimization process is to collect the data and to have reliable data collection process no need to be CMMS which better to have for sure, any source of data collection tool, secondly cluster your organization's process from easy to hard from optimization point of view, start with easy part to gain the momentum and encourage and engage your team each optimized process need to be validated by PDCA

Implement a Maintenance Management Software, greatly recommended the leading IBM Maximo. IBM Maximo empowers organizations to make data-driven maintenance decisions, improve asset reliability, and optimize maintenance planning. By leveraging predictive and preventive strategies, you can enhance overall efficiency and extend the useful life of your critical assets.

Maintenance optimization and improvements should be implemented methodically. Have a clear, well communicated plan, including all phases of the implementation from initiation through closeout, including training and support to manage the change, same as you would for a regular project. Ensure there is a method to measure the impact of the change after implementation. You want to know if the change has had the intended impact or not. If not, the understanding of the root cause may have been flawed leading to a flawed solution, in turn increasing frustrations of impacted stakeholders. People do not like change or instability. Do everything you can to get it right the first time.

Some usefull tools for improvement maintenance managment are; reliability centered maintenance, risk managment (maintenance planing), root cause analisys and criticallity analisys.

Entendo que temos várias ferramentas a nossa disposição, e começar pelo simples, é mais fácil, funcional, e barato, onde os resultados chegam e ficam sustentáveis, ou seja, uma boa inspeção sistemática, com rotinas inteligentes. Em equipamentos mais crônicos, adiciona-se a inspeção preditiva instrumentado, aliado aos planos de lubrificação e suas análises ferrográficas. Agora como tratar estas informações, sem perder o conteúdo, analisando os custos previstos mensais? Aí sim, investir na inteligência de processamento das informações, em um Planejamento competente, e participante baseado no “PDCA”. Aliado a engenharia da manutenção “confiabilidade”, onde se trata os desvios/falhas, com reporte ao PCM e execução. “Investir fortemente no PCM.”

Availability of the computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) will be highly effective to data driven optimizing and improvement of the existing maintenance plan. Having this type of application will track all the activities and record with relevant inputs. This will help to track the resource utilization and cost involvement of the activities as well. Further conducting comprehensive root cause analysis (RCA) and failure mode and effect analysis are vital tools to use for improvement journey. It needs to have proper recording of all these inputs and tracking the implementation to get the positive results. Addition to that having some sort of brainstorming session with the team will give inputs for the development.

I’m sure that the use of data and analytics to make maintenance decisions, prioritize tasks, and allocate resources effectively is the best way to optimize and improve maintenance and maintenance management and by doing that increase asset reliability an a safe industrial environment

Tools and techniques for maintenance optimization and improvement include: 1. **Predictive Maintenance (PdM) Tools**: Use sensors and data analytics to predict equipment failures. 2. **Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS)**: Manage maintenance schedules, track work orders, and store equipment history. 3. **Condition Monitoring**: Use technologies like vibration analysis and thermography to monitor equipment health. 4. **Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM)**: Analyze equipment functions and failures to determine optimal maintenance strategies. 5. **Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)**: Engage all employees in proactive maintenance activities.

Safety and risk are related. The best work management systems have safety embedded in their surrounding process. Worker safety and asset integrity are enhanced in a safety culture.

Informing & engaging stakeholders such as employees, contractors, management about your ongoing maintenance optimisation plan creates a supportive environment that enhances efficiency safety, cost management, & overall organisational success Involving employees in the maintenance optimisation process empowers them, leading to higher job satisfaction & morale Engaged stakeholders provide valuable feedback & innovative ideas, contributing to the continuous improvement of maintenance practices Contractors who are well-informed about the maintenance plan can align their services with the company's expectations, leading to more efficient & effective work. Regular communication about the maintenance plan fosters transparency all stakeholders.

Maintenance is inherently dangerous and the less maintenance in theory means less human risk. The end all be all of maintenance is to do nothing... this is only achieved through designing out failure modes. Reliability will not be increased implementing optimization, but the effects of sustaining inherent design reliability will increase. This is realized through availability, quality and performance. My 1 cent🤣

This article needs to take into account the human factor. Where I work, many of us have taken the stance that: “ If I win, you too have to win. This is the cornerstone of a successful corporation. “ Operators are confident to call on maintenance to report a suspected upcoming problem. They know that maintenance, at least some of us will show up, even for something simple like an adjustment. A properly adjusted machine needs less maintenance. A properly adjusted machine is easier to operate. Both groups win. Administration is aware, because everything is said openly over the radio. Admin wins.And when it’s a major problem developing, everyone can plan, before a catastrophe. All due to the properly encouraged human element.

Customers can also optimize their assets maintenance with the help of the manufacturers through maintenance agreements or partnerships with guaranteed asset performance contracts when available. Giving the opportunity to access history of components, real-time data and feedback from running equipements can help precisely define maintenance policy going forward and cost optimization for the end-user