Today, industries are looking for a change in the way maintenance is performed. In order to survive, organizations are searching for meaningful ways to offset the costs associated with performing maintenance activities while complying with evermore stringent regulatory compliance requirements at all levels of their operations.

There are also other less tangible factors to consider. It is no secret that companies must find some way to offset the effects of an aging workforce, where many highly skilled and experienced people are moving toward retirement. How will organizations cope? With fewer and fewer trades people entering the market, who will step up to take the place of those stepping down?

Costs are sometimes obvious-labor costs, for example, and costs associated with procurement of parts or items-but some are less apparent. Hidden costs can be associated with changing parts that are still functioning within specifications or the cost of carrying inventory over a period of time. Of course, there are many more situations where cost issues surface. Here is an especially important one to consider: critical asset failure.

The costly aftermath of critical failure
An organization has just undergone a failure of an asset critical to the production process.Understandably, this failure has received considerable attention from management.

During a follow-up management meeting to discuss the issue, several potential strategies are identified to ensure that another

such incident does not occur. It is decided that in order to prevent such a failure in the future, more conservative maintenance schedules need to be instituted for all critical assets. The justification for this is that if the maintenance strategy assumes worst-case failure rates and then compensates for this by applying a conservative scheduling buffer, failures will be eliminated. This is entirely correct.

However, there is a very high maintenance cost associated with this strategy. Labor costs increase as the frequency of maintenance increases. There is also an increase in parts procurement costs as more parts are replaced more often. Another hidden cost associated with this strategy is the cost of utilization. Replacement of parts that have not been utilized to the full extent of their remaining useful life can have a substantial cost impact.

Above all else, lost production matters most. This strategy for eliminating subsequent failures does not consider the impact to the production schedule; production may suffer worse damage over time than if a failure had occurred. The increased frequency of maintenance requires greater attention to planning and scheduling of not only the maintenance itself, but also of the production process. Companies are running so lean these days that any interruptions to their production have a significant impact on their financial statement.

Condition-based maintenance
As can be observed from this scenario, there are many opportunities for improvement to maintenance procedures. Thus, it's easy to make a business case for investing in technologies that maximize production while offsetting both hidden and direct maintenance costs.

One of the keys to improving maintenance is the proper and intelligent use of asset information that lies locked away within the minds...(Read whole article)