8 Tips to Achieve Exceptional Manufacturing Maintenance Practices

Achieving exceptional manufacturing maintenance practices is not easy, but it is critical for a company’s optimal bottomline. Getting there takes time, effort, and upfront costs, but the following tips can help plant managers and maintenance staff to implement effective maintenance procedures that will streamline their work and protect the manufacture’s investments and revenues.

1. Implement An Honest, Company-Wide Approach To Maintenance Value And Prioritization

Even if a company is in its early days and, by necessity, has a leaner operating budget than it expects to have one or more years down the road, a preventive maintenance strategy can still be implemented. By prioritizing maintenance events by cost and critical need, even a new business can implement their strategy from Day 1. Whether they can afford to purchase a continuous monitoring system, or can only afford to have an employee conduct daily visual checks and mark their notes on a daily log sheet, it is possible to start right away. Wherever the company begins, implementing a preventive maintenance strategy from the start is an easy way to integrate the value of regular maintenance into the culture of the business.

2. Don’t Ignore Inconvenient Data About The Costs of Prevention vs. Downtime

Be serious about understanding the cost of preventive maintenance versus the cost of equipment fatigue or total equipment failure. It is easy to make pro’s and con’s lists that favor a preferred position or even to collect data that tends to support either paying more for upfront issue prevention or paying later to fix things when they break. It is critical, however, to avoid confirmation bias and be fair to yourself and to your business when collecting and comparing data.

3. Plan Maintenance During Down/Slow Times

Of course, conducting maintenance during routine downtime reduces the impact on productivity, but there may be no better time. Midnight maintenance might be inconvenient, but it’s worth the hassle if it keeps your plant operating smoothly and productively during the daytime.

4. Don’t Ignore Your Own Maintenance Policies

When a manufacturer takes the time to develop and draft policies and procedures but fails to implement them, the business is almost certainly not running as efficiently, as productively, or as safely as it should be. This is particularly true with maintenance protocols. There is any number of reasons a policy gets ignored or forgotten over time, especially when things are running smoothly. If equipment maintenance protocols are ignored, however, the problems they are designed to prevent will, without fail, occur, and the resulting downtime will be a whole lot more costly than the time and effort it would have taken employees to adhere to the OEM policy.

5. Replace Unfruitful Preventative Maintenance With Continuous Monitoring

Not all preventive maintenance is cost-effective or fruitful. Don’t be afraid to scrap processes that simply do not produce the intended benefits simply because you feel that doing something is better than doing nothing. Rather, consider regular review of your maintenance policies and procedures and, if warranted, consider upgrading to a broad-spectrum continuous equipment monitoring system.

6. Trust Your Instincts And Those Of Your Staff

Keep your eyes open, your ears to the machines, and don’t ignore red flags. No matter how sophisticated your equipment monitoring system is, you and your experienced staff know what is ‘normal’ for your well-maintained equipment. If something looks, sounds, or smells ‘off’, err on the side of caution and don’t rely entirely on the absence of a computer readout error.

7. Make A Master Equipment List And Keep It Up To Date

Know what you have so you know what you have to lose. Having a practice of updating equipment lists on a frequent basis forces plant managers to deal with gaps in maintenance that occur from common changes, such as personnel resorting or turnover. Likewise, regular equipment cataloging provides regular opportunity to make sure all equipment is being adequately monitored and the collected data is being parsed and reviewed. This procedure can be the first indication that certain monitoring software is outdated or needs to be replaced with something more universal as new equipment is added to the plant.

8. Don’t Be Afraid Of Having To Many Policies And Procedures—Be Afraid Of Having Ones You Don’t Use

Of course, there is nothing inherently dangerous about having a policy or procedure you don’t use, but there is tremendous value in asking yourself why you have a policy or procedure that you don’t actually use. Is it a good procedure that you simply choose not to enforce? Is it difficult or impossible to enforce because of a bottleneck from higher up? Is it unclear who is responsible for enforcing it? Paying attention to why a policy or procedure goes unused can bring greater problems into focus in addition to helping you get those useful but seldom used policies into working order.

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