5. Technical and Interpersonal Training

The training function of maintenance insures that the technicians working on the equipment have the technical skills that are required to understand and maintain the equipment. Additionally, those involved in the maintenance functions must have the interpersonal skills to be able to communicate with other departments in the company. They must also be able to work in a team or natural work group environment. Without these skills, there is little possibility of maintaining the current status of the equipment. Furthermore, the probability of ever making any improvement in the equipment is inconceivable.

While there are exceptions, the majority of companies today lack the technical skills within their organizations to maintain their equipment. In fact, studies have shown that almost one-third of the adult population in the United States is functionally illiterate or just marginally better. When these figures are coupled with the lack of apprenticeship programs available to technicians, the specter becomes reality of a work place where the technology of the equipment exceeds the skills of the technicians that operate or maintain it.

6. Operational Involvement

Operational Involvement requires the operations, production, or facilities departments to take ownership of their equipment to the extent that they are willing to support the maintenance and engineering department’s efforts. The aspects of involvement vary from company to company. The involvement activities may include some of the following:

Inspecting equipment prior to start up

Making out work requests for maintenance (includes building occupants requesting work)

Recording breakdown or malfunction data for equipment

Performing some basic equipment service (e.g., lubrication)

Performing routine adjustments on equipment

Performing maintenance activities (supported by central maintenance)

The extent to which operations, production, or facilities is involved in maintenance activities may depend on the complexity of the equipment, the skills of the individuals, or even union agreements. The goal should always be to free up some of the maintenance and engineering resources to concentrate on more advanced asset management techniques.

7. Predictive Maintenance

Once the maintenance and engineering resources have been freed up by the involvement, they should be refocused on the predictive technologies that apply to the assets. For example, rotating equipment is a natural fit for vibration analysis, electrical equipment for thermography, and so forth. In some cases, the devices monitoring the asset may be connected to a building automation system, a distributed control system, or a PLC (Programmable Logic Controller) system and all parameters are monitored in a real-time environment.

The focus is not to purchase all the technology available, but to investigate and purchase technology that solves or mitigates chronic equipment problems that exist. The predictive inspections should be planned and scheduled utilizing the same techniques that are used to schedule the preventive tasks. All data should be recorded in or interfaced to the CMMS.

8. Reliability-Centered Maintenance

Once the data is recorded, Reliability-Centered Maintenance (RCM) techniques are now applied to the preventive and predictive efforts to optimize the programs. If a particular asset is environmentally sensitive, safety related, or extremely critical to the operation, then the appropriate PM/PDM techniques are decided upon and utilized.

If an asset is going to restrict or impact the production or operational capacity of the company, then another level of PM/PDM activities are applied with a cost ceiling in mind. If the asset was allowed to fail and the cost is the expense to replace or rebuild the asset, then yet another level of PM/PDM activities is specified. There is always the possibility that it is more economical to allow some assets run to failure. This option is considered in RCM.

The RCM tools require data to be effective. For this reason the RCM process is utilized after the organization has attained a level of maturity that insures accurate and complete asset data.

9. Total Productive Maintenance

Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) is an operational philosophy, under which everyone in the company understands that in some way their job performance impacts the performance of the asset. For example, operations must understand the true capacity of the equipment and does not run it beyond design specifications, creating unnecessary breakdowns. The purchasing department must always buy the spare parts to the correct specifications and not try to save a small amount, creating breakdowns because the parts did not last as long as they should.

TPM is like Total Quality Management. The only change is that instead of companies focusing on their products, their focus shifts to their assets. All of the tools and techniques used to implement, sustain, and improve the total quality effort can be utilized in TPM.