Understanding the basic concept of manufacturing equipment Proactive Maintenance

In most industries, maintenance and operations hold meetings everyday to discuss what had failed, and sometimes what is done to stop it from happening. In Proactive Maintenance, it is likely to identify all failure modes which are likely to affect the asset in order to determine what will happen when a failure occurs and what should be done to anticipate prevention, detection, prediction or redesigning the equipment.

Proactive Maintenance is about analyzing why failures occur so that recurrence is finally eliminated and thereby extending the life of the part or component of a machine. Proactive Maintenance is when maintenance team or a group of cross functional team analyzes the failure with analytical techniques such as Root Cause Failure Analysis, FMEA, Kepner Tregoe, Why-why Analysis, P-M Analysis, Fault tree Analysis, etc. are used to better understand why the failure occurred in the first place.

Remember that in Preventive Maintenance, we replace the part that we think is in the process of wearing out. In this type of maintenance task, we think that replacing the part will bring the equipment back to its original condition. But we have not taken into account the need to analyze further why a certain part keeps on failing.

In Proactive Maintenance, we need to understand the following concepts:

1.Redesign or modification. Includes changing the specification of the component, adding a new item, replacing an entire machine with a different type, relocating a machine or changing the process or procedure which affects the operation of the machine

2.Safety and Environmental Aspects. Reduce the probability of failure mode occurring to a level which is acceptable, replacing a component with stronger or more reliable replacement making the failure no longer a threat to safety and environment.

3.Operational and non-operation consequences. Reduce the number of times failure occurs, reduce or eliminate the consequences of a failure (example thru redundancy) and preventive tasks is cost effective hence alternate solution is to re-design.

Before a machine is to be re-designed, we must first understand several factors to be considered. First, the failure must have involved a major operational consequence. Second, the cost of the scheduled maintenance or breakdown maintenance must be high. Third, the specific cost which can be eliminated by the design change is notable. Forth, the design should have no harmful effects which can be generated afterwards. Fifth, there should be an economic trade off study on expected cost savings when re-design is made. And lastly, the asset to stay or to be used for a long time and not will be decommissioned.

Trouble shooting as in the case of Reactive Maintenance is no longer an effective strategy. In today’s competitive works, the “Analysis” finds the real solutions. And thus, Proactive Maintenance is a must!.