Maximo Reporting

1. Breakdown maintenance:
In this type of maintenance, no care is taken for the machine, until equipment fails. Repair is then undertaken. This type of maintenance could be used when the equipment failure does not significantly affect the operation or production or generate any significant loss other than repair cost. However, an important aspect is that the failure of a component from a big machine may be injurious to the operator. Hence breakdown maintenance should be avoided.

2. Preventive maintenance:
It is a daily maintenance (cleaning, inspection, oiling and re-tightening), design to retain the healthy condition of equipment and prevent failure through the prevention of deterioration, periodic inspection or equipment condition diagnosis, to measure deterioration. It is further divided into periodic maintenance and predictive maintenance. Just like human life is extended by preventive medicine, the equipment service life can be prolonged by doing preventive maintenance.
2a. Periodic maintenance (Time based maintenance - TBM):
Time based maintenance consists of periodically inspecting, servicing and
cleaning equipment and replacing parts to prevent sudden failure and process
problems. E.g. Replacement of coolant or oil every 15 days.
2b. Predictive maintenance:
This is a method in which the service life of important part is predicted based
on inspection or diagnosis, in order to use the parts to the limit of their
service life. Compared to periodic maintenance, predictive maintenance is
condition-based maintenance. It manages trend values, by measuring and analyzing
data about deterioration and employs a surveillance system, designed to monitor
conditions through an on-line system. E.g. Replacement of coolant or oil, if
there is a change in color. Change in color indicates the deteriorating
condition of the oil. As this is a condition-based maintenance, the oil or
coolant is replaced.

3. Corrective maintenance:
It improves equipment and its components so that preventive maintenance can be carried out reliably. Equipment with design weakness must be redesigned to improve reliability or improving maintainability. This happens at the equipment user level. E.g. installing a guard, to prevent the burrs falling in the coolant tank.

4. Maintenance prevention:
This program indicates the design of new equipment. Weakness of current machines is sufficiently studied (on site information leading to failure prevention, easier maintenance and prevents of defects, safety and ease of manufacturing). The observations and the study made are shared with the equipment manufacturer and necessary changes are made in the design of new machine.

In today’s industrial scenario huge losses/wastage occur in the manufacturing shop floor. This waste is due to operators, maintenance personal, process, tooling problems and non-availability of components in time etc. Other forms of waste includes idle machines, idle manpower, break down machine, rejected parts etc are all examples of waste. The quality related waste are of significant importance as they matter the company in terms of time, material and the hard earned reputation of the company. There are also other invisible wastes like operating the machines below the rated speed, start up loss, break down of the machines and bottle necks in process. Zero oriented concepts such as zero tolerance for waste, defects, break down and zero accidents are becoming a pre-requisite in the manufacturing and assembly industry. In this situation, a revolutionary concept of TPM has been adopted in many industries across the world to address the above said problems.

What is Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)?
It can be considered as the medical science of machines. Total Productive Maintenance (TPM) is a maintenance program, which involves a newly defined concept for maintaining plants and equipment. The goal of the TPM program is to markedly increase production while, at the same time, increasing employee morale and job satisfaction.
TPM brings maintenance into focus as a necessary and vitally important part of the business. It is no longer regarded as a non-profit activity. Down time for maintenance is scheduled as a part of the manufacturing day and, in some cases, as an integral part of the manufacturing process. The goal is to hold emergency and unscheduled maintenance to a minimum.

Why TPM?

TPM was introduced to achieve the following objectives. The important ones are listed below.
• Avoid wastage in a quickly changing economic environment.
• Producing goods without reducing product quality.
• Reduce cost.
• Produce a low batch quantity at the earliest possible time.
• Goods send to the customers must be non-defective.

Similarities and differences between TQM and TPM:

The TPM program closely resembles the popular Total Quality Management (TQM) program. Many of the tools such as employee empowerment, benchmarking, documentation, etc. used in TQM are used to implement and optimize TPM. Following are the similarities between the two.

1. Total commitment to the program by upper level management is required in both
programmes
J. Venkatesh Monday, April 16, 2007 1
2. Employees must be empowered to initiate corrective action, and
3. A long-range outlook must be accepted as TPM may take a year or more to
implement and is an on-going process. Changes in employee mind-set toward their
job responsibilities must take place as well.

Exercising 20 minutes every morning is better than a heart-transplant. Won’t the same common sense apply to your maintenance and reliability?

Have you thought about it?
It seems intriguing and yet so true.
As engineers lost in the iron-clad world of engines, assembly lines, tool-boxes, turbines and metal all around; it’s easy to forget what machines are all about.

It’s easy to forget that just because they are machines, they can not be treated with some attributes a human is naturally eligible for – care, attention and rest.

While the human resources in your factory get the above entities as fair rights and can even rouse a commotion if neglected for long; machines can not make noise about their rights.
Nevertheless, they too need some attention, care and break-time. They might not have a Union to represent their case but beware of the noise they might make, at the wrong time and at very wrong decibels.

Ask yourself some brutal and candid questions – Do you treat maintenance as a necessary evil? Just as a formality? Often neglect it? Even when done, it’s only with a ‘we will fix it when it breaks’ approach?

How many of us would laugh at a word like ‘Planned Downtime’?
How many of us scoff a term called ‘Preventive Maintenance’?
How many of us would shrug shoulders when asked about the number of hours devoted to regular upkeep of machines?

Now answer this one.
How many of us would mock a doctor if s/he suggests you to exercise, take preventive medicine or vaccination to stay away from heart attacks?

The ‘you must be kidding’ guffaw suddenly vanishes.
Answers vary, right?
Take a moment here before it’s too late to amend.

A machine may not have a heart but the rules of preventive healthcare apply to it in almost an equal degree.
Preventive maintenance is not an alien term these days. Not at least in world-class companies or in international counter parts. Sadly, the state of affairs is very acutely dismal in India.

Just like a medical emergency can be avoided by regular and preventive healthcare, so can plant emergencies be avoided, if care of machines entails preventive maintenance, instead of reactive maintenance.

For the uninitiated, preventive genre of maintenance is something that is done via planned downtime and predictive shutdowns.

Critics and naysayers apropos this concept may argue that it’s all a Phirang concept and very very copybook style, hence not being practical at all.

Reasons you avoid it

Some arguments are reasonable. Yes, an engineer’s plate is always full of hectic schedules, tight deadlines, production targets etc. If one has to be competitive and be on the top, one can’t afford to waste time on planned outages and other stuff. So many big deals and orders would than just pass us by like a ship in the night, is a plausible question.
But ponder again, with that kind of an attitude, would the same company be able to hold the appellation of being ‘big’ or ‘major’ as one may proudly refer to it. It’s not a world class company if it treats maintenance like a step-child, right?

Any international-level comparison is proof enough that great companies treat preventive-reactive maintenance in an 85 per cent: 5 per cent split. It’s weird that top management of companies in India is so negligent. So it’s not all theory and idealistic. In fact, preventive approach is more pragmatic than quixotic.

Consider the healthcare analogy here.

People are ready to take the risk of a long sick leave, lifelong maladies, costly surgeries, obnoxious chemical doses and treatments, and utter physical discomfort but they would always shrug off one day of annual medical check-up or 15 minutes of daily exercise. Who has got the time, is the rhetoric one often hears.

But isn’t vaccination always a better option? If you spare one day or small breaks to save you a big stretch of unproductive and distressing treatment time, what’s the harm? Specially because in some cases, it can save lives.

Machines or humans; both depreciate with time, both can breakdown, but if you keep taking the breaks for fitness and health, the longevity is visible. So is productivity.

There are always some hours one can take out from an evening or night time window. One can plan your inventory in advance so that planned downtime does not interrupt production targets. Even if it is mission-critical equipment, let’s say in a turbine or a nuclear reactor, one can always use redundancies and back-up.

Whether it’s the heart or a big machine, the arteries need to be lubricated timely, else they fail, and in most cases without any warning. A heart attack always hurts.

Side-effects

The truth is harsh and there is a much bigger picture to preventive maintenance than mere productivity improvement, or averting last-minute breakdowns.
Engineers or technically inclined professionals are cogent, intelligent and in a better position to make a difference to this world, and yet they don’t use these powers. They say the opposite of love is not hatred but indifference. Isn’t it anything but indifference that ultimately leads to grave tragedies like BP oil leak or Bhopal gas incident? Think about the safety hazards, the environmental repercussions and over-energy-usage that are a direct backwash of maintenance-neglect.

Look closer, and we will discover the crevices where we let it slip away.
One major gap is the way we document and manage production-records. There’s a conspicuous lack of proper systems or automation on that area, which deters preventive maintenance. And that coupled with management’s attitude is also the reason why even well-chalked out AMCs (Annual Maintenance Contracts) are not administered properly.

The long-term repercussions of these gaps can be quite huge.

When, a machine breaks down abruptly, it’s hard to fix it on the go. The spare parts are not always available. It takes some time to retune something when it goes out of kilter.

Then there are other implications. Those hours of reactive repair translate into time-creeps, schedules going awry, quality getting affected, supply chain getting hammered and of course the eventual impact on top line, bottom line, lost man hours, and sometimes serious safety issues. It’s funny how we forget that small mosquitoes can upset even an elephant.


And yet, we still ignore the obvious woodcutter’s rule of sharpening one’s axe.
Your machine is your axe. It helps you to cut through all those targets, ambitious projects and business momentum with efficiency. That’s exactly why it’s wiser to sharpen it once in a while.

After all there’s still that time-tested adage – A break is always better than a breakdown.