The Maintenance Paradigm: Unlocking Capacity and Consistency
by Jeffrey Craig, CMRP | Reliability & Maintenance Professional
Fuss & O’Neill Manufacturing Solutions
In many organizations, maintenance is either undervalued or not valued at all. This could be partly because of the organizational culture that treats maintenance as a “luxury,” “necessary evil,” or a repair department. This couldn’t be further from the truth. The value that maintenance brings to an organization is capacity. The capacity to make more products of consistent quality and with as little interruption as possible directly influences safety, cost, and on-time delivery, which directly impacts the bottom line.
Preventative (PM) and Predictive (PdM) maintenance can tell an organization about the current health of its equipment. This is done by keeping accurate records of maintenance actions and repairs over the equipment’s lifetime. Unfortunately, organizations do not do a good job of keeping these records, or they do not keep them at all. A Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) is a good way to track maintenance efforts. This system is only as good as the information entered, and this is where understanding the current condition starts.
Work order information is a good KPI of how effective an organization’s maintenance efforts are. For example, 25% of a maintenance organization’s corrective backlog should be generated by PMs. If this is not the case, the question should be asked: Are the PMs being conducted providing value? In short, are they preventing anything? If they are not preventing a specific failure, then we need to understand why. Are all the technicians completing the tasks the same way, and if not, why? However, to understand the information being tracked, it needs to be detailed to be useful. Corrective work orders are no different. If the reason for the work order is “it’s broken,” and the repair information is “it’s fixed,” then the failure will more than likely occur over and over and never be resolved. Your thoroughness in tracking and reporting these details is key to your maintenance effectiveness.
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Jeff Craig
Jeff has more than 30 years of experience in Engineering and Maintenance Management. A natural leader, Jeff has spent his career training both civilians and military personnel in the art of technical and program management. He is an expert in safety program management and has extensive process improvement experience.
As a Reliability and Maintenance Professional for Fuss & O’Neill’s Manufacturing Solutions, Jeff works with clients to integrate total process management to improve efficiency, safety, and the bottom line. Jeff is an expert and proponent of TPM (Total Productive Maintenance) and Maintenance Excellence procedures because he has seen, firsthand, the benefits these practices bring. He integrates his practical experience into classes to emphasize real-world applications and to effectively communicate the subject matter. He focuses on individualized client