IMPROVED PRODUCTIVITY can be achieved by better condition monitoring, planning of work and scheduling of work combined with an efficient store including an accurate bill of materials to support more efficient planning. The best organizations I have worked with have very little wasted time because of good leadership and an efficient work management process. More importantly they have higher reliability and faster production throughput and consequently lower manufacturing costs. They manage by what drives cost and results, not by cost alone and they see lower costs as an outcome of higher reliability and faster production throughput.

Less efficient organizations are more short-sighted and put emphasis on staying within the maintenance budget rather than doing what is necessary to deliver stable and reliable quality production output. Maintenance managers are often driven to stay within budget to the extent that reliability suffers.

As a maintenance manager you need to have a three to five year plan covering:

• How good your organization is today.
• How good it can become.
• How you are going to close this gap.
• How much it will cost.
• How much savings in reliability and costs will be generated.

All the above must be supported with a strong business case so you can sell it to decision makers. Remember that most of this is common sense so do not over complicate it and the good thing is that it is not a question of much capital money, if any, it is a matter of doing better with what you already have.

As part of your business case you should know where your maintenance organization spend its maintenance hours. This absolutely does not mean that you make any time studies. Instead you divide where time is used into three categories:

• Corrective maintenance
• Preventative maintenance
• Continuous improvement

Corrective maintenance is here defined as all maintenance carried out in order to correct a failure or a break down.

It can be done in four different ways:

1. Planned and Scheduled
2. Only Planned
3. Only Scheduled
4. Break in work in schedules

Number 1 and 2 are where you like to spend most time. The fact is that most organizations spend the majority of their time on weekly and daily maintenance in numbers 3 and 4. During shut downs the situation is better, but if you spend more than 5 % of your time on numbers 3 and 4 during a shut down you need to improve on this.

Preventive maintenance (PM) is here defined as all maintenance carried out in order to prevent failures, or to discover failures before they develop to a break down. If your PM has the right content and is executed right your organization shall not be in a reactive mode.

Continuous improvement is here defined as work done to do Root Cause Problem Elimination (RCPE). In a reactive organization this is close to zero maintenance hours even if your organization has a process and people have been trained.

In this actual example of a World

Class or Great Organization in the food industry, time is used as in the example in Figure 1.

• All preventive maintenance including basic inspections, predictive maintenance and lubrication is about 10 % of all maintenance hours if all tasks are optimized.
• Only scheduled and break in work is 10 %.
• Planned and scheduled work is 60 %.
• Hours for continuous improvement are 20 %.

If your organization has reached this level of excellence the results will be that reliability is steadily increasing and costs are decreasing.

Christer Idhammar (info@idcon.com) is a world-renowned and multi award winning Reliability and Maintenance Consultant and Guru. He is the Founder and CEO of IDCON INC in Raleigh NC, USA; A reliability and maintenance training and consulting company to the Industry worldwide since 1972. www.idcon.com

Christer Idhammar,

Founder and CEO IDCON INC,

www.idcon.com