MAINTENANCE MANAGEMENT

MAINTENANCE MANAGEMENT

          The term ‘maintenance’ means to keep the equipment in operational condition or repair it to its operational mode. Main objective of the maintenance is to have increased availability of production systems, with increased safety and optimized cost. Maintenance management involves managing the functions of maintenance.

MAINTENANCE STRATEGIES OR OPTIONS

A maintenance strategy or option means a scheme for maintenance, i.e. an elaborate

and systematic plan of maintenance action. Following are the maintenance strategies  that are commonly applied in the plants.

•  Breakdown maintenance or operate to failure or unplanned maintenance.
•  Preventive or scheduled maintenance.
•  Predictive or condition based maintenance.
•  Opportunity maintenance
•  Design out maintenance.

The equipment under breakdown maintenance is allowed to run until it breaks down and then repairing it and putting back to the operation. In preventive or scheduled maintenance, maintenance actions such as inspection, lubrication, cleaning, adjustment and replacement are undertaken at fixed intervals of numbers of hours or kilometers. The condition based or predictive maintenance is preferred for critical systems and for such systems breakdown maintenance is to be avoided. In opportunity maintenance, timing of maintenance is determined by the procedure adopted for some other item in the same unit or plant. In design out maintenance, the aim is to minimize the effect of failures and in fact eliminates the cause of maintenance.  

        In addition to the above, new strategies concepts such as Proactive Maintenance,

Reliability Centered Maintenance, Total Productive Maintenance, etc. have recently been evolved to look it from different perspectives and this has helped in developing effective maintenance.

FUNCTIONS OF A MAINTENANCE DEPARTMENT

Following are the major functions of a maintenance department:

•  Maintenance of installed equipment and facilities.
•  Installations of new equipment and facilities.
•  PM tasks- Inspection and lubrication of existing equipment.
•  CM tasks-monitoring of faults and failures using appropriate techniques.
•  Modifications of already installed equipment and facilities.
•  Management of inventory.
•  Supervision of manpower.
•  Keeping records.

MAINTENANCE ORGANIZATION

It concerns in achieving an optimum balance between plant availability and maintenance resource utilization. The two organization structures that are common are centralized and decentralized. A decentralized structure would probably experience a lower utilization than centralized one but would be able to respond quickly to breakdowns and would achieve higher plant availability. In Practice, one may have a mix of these two. A Maintenance organization can be considered as being made up the following three necessary and independent components:-

•  Resources: Men, spares and tools.
•  Administration: A Hierarchy of authority and responsibility for deciding what, when and how work should be carried out.
•  Work Planning and control systems: A mechanism for planning and scheduling the work and feeding back the information that is needed for correctly directing the maintenance effort towards defined objective.

ELEMENTS OF EFFECTIVE MAINTENANCE MANAGEMENT

An effective maintenance system includes the following elements:

•  Maintenance policy.
•  Control of materials.
•  Condition monitoring.
•  Work order.
•  Job planning.
•  Priority and backlog control.
•  Data recording system.
•  Performance measurement measures or indices.