What are the most effective equipment maintenance cost management strategies for Plant Operations?

Following the standard maintenance procedures (SMP), recommendations of OEM reliability practices and proper operation of the equipment will lead to its efficient service life. Equipment start up and stop method checks to be properly followed. Skilled and trained should carry out the maintenance activities. These all things to keep focus for lowering the breakdown occurrence.

Yes preventive maintenance is a must. Making sure everything is in good working condition and number one safe working conditions. Making sure everything is set at the correct specs for maximum production. Daily logs and checks of your plants equipment and keeping records of what works and what doesn’t. For example, buying screen panels for diester screen that are cheap vs well made ones. The cheap ones you will spend more time and money replacing vs well made that last almost triple the time (also correct configuration screen cloths for your brand of screen brand of shaker). Figuring out where your bottle neck areas are and see if there’s a way to fix it to increase your production. But yes preventative maintenance is a very important 👍

Maintenance is integral part, need to consider obviously. But after all business needs balance for everything then only overhead can be minimized & profits can be made. In such stringent conditions, every plant should derive the high / Low cost maint area for its optimization. Based on the OEM'S suggestions & actual situations maint team should bring various ways to mitigate such gaps. It is possible with proper analysis of the each failure. Everyone should understand, machine do not fail, only components do fail. When u do proper RCA on each downtime, you know the area of concern & leverage. Use of any analysis tool, out of the box thinking, challenging team can give results. Outsourcing, AMC, localization can be adopted as per need.

Preventive maintenance is the act of performing regularly scheduled maintenance activities to help prevent unexpected failures in the future. Put simply, it's about fixing things before they break.

In my opinion this is the minimum; while in the beginning production life of equipment it will appear to keep equipment reliable it will not sufice for long term reliability. The mean time between failures will shorten over the life of the equipment.

Predictive maintenance is not rocket science but requires very disciplined collection of data. Once you have clean data, standard algorithms can be run to predict equipment behaviour. The key lies in starting small, automating data collection as far as possible, carefully curate data and ability to ask right business question you want answered.

Predictive maintenance is a good method to keep the reliability of a piece of equipment up, as long as the data collected in real time is accurate , followed and acted on. If corrupted data is discovered it has to be corrected, otherwise it becomes an elevated cost.

Use Maintenance Checklists............. A checklist can also help ensure that maintenance is on schedule and to specification, so every machine or piece of equipment receives the top standard of care regularly, and nothing is missed. A comprehensive maintenance checklist should include: Where the commercial machine, or piece of equipment is located. When it was last serviced Pictures of issues or concerns during maintenance details about the specific maintenance request A space for contact info and signatures

The key role in gathering and analysing the data is of Inspection Department. The data collection and timely analysis will reveal timeline of predictive maintenance which can conclude the preventive maintenance schedule. 70% to 80% break downs can be prevented by an effective predictive mantenance practice expecially in the field of Condensers and heat exchangers.

Predictive maintenance caters to the need of always maintening the equipment according the its age, running hours and needs. However, it also depends on operational awareness and data collection. Small and repetitive maintenace reduces the risk of a major breakdown. On the other hand, major maintenance is taken care by preventive maintenance propgram which further reduces the possibility of a breakdown thereby reducing the cost and damage to business by reducing machine downtime.

Reliability centered maintenance is the best and most comprehensive method when applied honestly and correctly, there can be equipment this would not be cost effective for, usually the minor pieces of the process. When applied correctly and a good history is kept of findings and trends one should expect a long reliable run life as long as the application and installation of the equipment is correct.

Reliability Centered Maintenance is one of the valuable program in term of maintenance Strategy . it help to focus on machine criticality , it designs the right preventive maintenance instructions for equipment, advice the right level of spares need for equipment and help to increase availability and reliability of the same equipment .

The most effective cost management for equipment are to ensure its parameters timely bases by the inspection and operation personals should be running on its healthy mode like the the parameters are given to maintained in its manual should be followed and tests are done before time ends of its test like corrosion and thickness tests. load in and outs pressures and temperatures should be normal.

Any continuous leakage of water or concentrated liquid can cause of damage of equipment to prevent it preventative maintenance should not be neglected by any means

Using long life wear protection has a better payback though they may look more expensive on the face. For instance, opt for ceramic lined pipes instead of rubber lined piping because the longer life will give extra plant run time which gives you extra revenue and cuts back maintenance time/cost as well. Another example is using ceramic spigots and vortex finders which will give you up to 3 months run time depending on how abrasive the ore is, compared to rubber spigots which will only last about a week.

All what is described is required individually as part of Maintenance Management whether RCM or conventional. The most important factors that contributes to the cost effectiveness are Competency or skill level of technicians, Operations staff both. If the operations is not reliable it will impact the equipment performance making it become faulty abnormally, similarly if technicians don't do a highly competent job not only they take more wrench time but could also contribute additional negative issues to the equipment. So both MTTR and MTBF are important factors to keep track of , in addition to random checks on technicians skills and competency.

Field/Plant, DCS operators and shift incharges shall have discussions on trouble shooting of plant and process as well. As much plant personals as know the process of plants and its chemistry they are more easy go with the rectification of any trouble or emergency on plant. The best practice to have technical discussions periodically.

A holistic approach at a plant level shall yield best possible outcomes. Points to be considered: 1. Integration of various equipment to relevant digital applications 2. An MES that has preventive, predictive maintenance, TPM & OEE shall be a best companion throughout the process 3.Learning from earlier bottlenecks, downtime analysis, area where downtime has occurred and ensuring a thorough risk mitigation plans for future 4.Pro-active maintenance & monitoring - day to day, weekly checks 5. Mapping of OEE data parameters with each & individual equipment ( mono vs multi) & correlation analysis 6. Real-time traceability to the manufacturing stakeholders 4.