With a revenue of 100 million, an hour of downtime costs you 11 400 €. That could be one month worth of your maintenance crew paychecks gone in just 60 minutes.
Allowing for a 1% rate of manufacturing equipment error (which sounds pretty good, right?), more than 100 000 patients‘ pacemakers would fail (more than 10 million were sold in the last 5 years).
Anything that moves, rotates, scrolls or rolls, any press, laser, saw or drill – every machine will wear down.
That’s a fact we need to accept. When we do, it’ll free us from the wishful thinking of 100% uptime, errorless, 24/7 production. Because that is not realistic.
What is realistic is taking care of your equipment the right way. You can’t stop machines from breaking, but you can set up processes to minimize the impact of such events.
Ask yourself: What hurts less? Seeing the dentist once a year for a check up or not going there until your mouth is swollen?
Good news is, we are here to help you keep any equipment in top shape (but seriously, schedule an appointment with your dentist, you never know :).
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Different strokes for different folks
There are many different approaches to equipment maintenance. The right one is determined by your industry, types of machines you use, and the type of product you make. What works in textile industry won’t be effective for semiconductor producer and vice versa.
PM – preventive maintenance
Preventive maintenance is performed at regular intervals. Easy to implement and easy to plan. May be time and cost-consuming to execute – more staff may be needed to perform all related tasks.
Most of your people’s time will be used on checking and maintaining machines that don’t need immediate attention.
When implementing PM, you can easily predict the workload of maintenance staff. The downside is they’ll probably work more than the machines need.
On the flipside, it’s a pretty straightforward practice and may be worth it, if that’s your priority.
CBM – condition-based maintenance
With CBM the maintenance is triggered when sensors indicate abnormal values (pressure, temperature, vibration…) – that is when a „condition“ is met. CBM uses predictive maintenance approach – its goal is to alert you before a failure may occur.
This is a much more sophisticated process and as such is designed to help diagnose specific problems. By monitoring different signals coming from various parts of the machine the staff can pinpoint where the risk of failure is rising.
CBM needs infrastructure – maintenance workers can monitor equipment on-site or off-site, but either way there will have to be a lot of sensors connected to your network. Depending on your situation that may involve some IT work.
MEBM – manufacturing error-based maintenance
This approach focuses on manufacturing errors. While CBM focuses on the machine itself, MEBM is concerned about the output. When the rate of faulty products rises above permitted level, maintenance staff is called to check the equipment and look for a problem.
MEBM uses automated real-time error monitoring. This way you can immediately fix problems and reduce maintenance costs as much as possible – you literally check the equipment only when it makes unexpected mistakes.
This strategy is most useful with high-precision tools. When you make clothes or furniture, 0,1 milimeter means nothing. But with microchips that difference can ruin the entire batch.
Reporting equipment maintenance
Any maintenance process you choose, there is always a human being performing the task. And these humans need to report their findings, progress, or obstacles that prevent successful resolution.
And for that we have a free checklist for you!
At Resco, we help companies from various industries to rationalize workloads, costs and success rate of maintaining their equipment.
Our checklist is 100% free to download, no strings attached. If you need a customized version, with our dedicated designer tool you can change it to your liking or pick from 100+ templates.
Checklists make it easier for you to minimize downtime, lower the amount of defective output, and to track staff’s progress when maintaining machines. Our clients‘ managers are over the moon for them!
Download your free checklist here.
Get a free Equipment maintenance checklist
& provide guidance to workers handling equipment inspections