Industrial Preventive Maintenance Management Systems

Learn about the industrial Preventive Maintenance Management systems that production and maintenance managers in plants and factories are currently using to increase the availability of their machines and thus achieve productivity rates above 4%.

The KPIs of production managers are very specific and are generally oriented towards productivity: quantity of product produced in relation to the resources used. To achieve this productivity, different elements such as raw materials, machine productivity, people, etc. are managed. But where is the management of industrial Preventive Maintenance?

The maintenance of machinery is one of the most demanding aspects of production efficiency. As there are many industrial sectors, some more mature than others in relation to maintenance, there are two types of production managers: reactive and proactive.

Manage industrial Preventive Maintenance in a reactive way.

Maintenance that starts from a purely reactive management, where something is repaired when it fails, is usually based on a set of actions performed by repairing or replacing equipment when it has failed. This is a type of management where heavy investments are made; acquiring back-up equipment, stand-by manpower, external services to cover the lack of in-house manpower, high levels of spare parts stock, emergency procurement of spare parts and non-inventoried materials to support this type of maintenance.

Typically, production managers who manage reactively have a maintenance department with unskilled people and tools and a large stock of parts and spares to be able to absorb the demand for failures and corrective breakdowns. This type of reactive management is very costly, which gives the production manager a known maintenance budget, even if it is costly. His priority is to be able to meet any request despite the high cost.

This known, even historical, maintenance cost, not requiring additional investment or major changes, gives the production manager peace of mind as he knows what his budget is and feels in control of maintenance, despite not seeing the opportunity to improve maintenance cost savings or even increase his productivity. This situation is one of the extremes of today's machinery maintenance management.

Manage industrial Preventive Maintenance in a Proactive way.

The other extreme is the system of Industrial Preventive Maintenance proactive, where the production manager is in charge of technical staff who are not only responsible for maintenance, but whose activities are also aimed at reliability and proactive maintenance management. Proactivity reduces the stock of spare parts to a minimum because it has implemented predictive and preventive systems in its machines that ensure that wear and tear is known, regular and controlled. As a result, the spare parts stock is reduced, the staff will be more technically trained in the application of methods and in some cases the labour requirements will even be lower. Initially the initial expenditure may be higher than the reactive approach, but it gives a 2% to 4% higher productivity to the production manager that the reactive model is unable to deliver.

The economic benefits of this 4% of productivity far outweigh the resource investments required in proactive maintenance. Particular sectors where this model is used include the graphic arts sector where very reliable and robust assets are used, the petrochemical sector where the product is very expensive and therefore productivity is key and other sectors such as steel, automotive, etc.

By way of conclusion we can say that today managers will move in two extremes when it comes to managing industrial preventive maintenance:

• Those who have their maintenance costs limited, even if they are very high, and are reassured by the fact that they control their maintenance costs with a large stock, a large warehouse, and a large number of low-cost operational staff available, even if they are not specialised. All these resources serve as a counterforce to meet any request coming from any demand, such as logistics, production, etc.
• A second group of production managers who have very advanced maintenance systems, with a budget that may initially be higher than the previous ones but which offers the production manager a 4% of more productivity that is directly reflected in the department's profit and loss account with higher profits than the other system.

How you are currently managing the maintenance of your machines. If you want to know more about different technologies to optimise industrial plants and systems to Manage the Industrial Preventive Maintenance of your plant we invite you to subscribe to the Technology newsletter for industry.