Nidhix will refine and optimize your current Preventive Maintenance program to incorporate industry best practices in the areas of equipment criticality, failure mode and effects methodology, Strategy Optimisation procedure reconciliation, and safety skill utilization and application.
Maintenance costs defined by normal plant accounting procedures, are normally a major portion of the total operating costs in most plants. Traditional maintenance costs (i.e., labour and material) in Australia have escalated at a tremendous rate over the past 10 years. Because of the unreasonably high maintenance costs, they represent the greatest potential short-term improvement. Delays, product rejects, scheduled maintenance downtime, and traditional maintenance costs—such as labour, overtime, and repair parts—are the major contributors to abnormal maintenance costs within a plant.
Resource industry majorly utilise below types of maintenance management systems widely in their organization:
Run-to-failure Strategy logic is simple and straightforward. When a machine breaks, fix it. This ”if it is not broken, do not fix it” method of maintaining plant machinery has been a major part of plant maintenance operations since the first manufacturing plant was built, and on the surface sounds reasonable. A plant using run-to-failure management does not have any budget on planned maintenance until a machine or system fails to operate. Run-to-failure is a reactive maintenance process that waits for equipment to fail before any maintenance action is taken. It is no-maintenance approach of management. It is also the most expensive method for maintaining assets.
The major cost associated with this type of maintenance strategy are:
The net result of this reactive type of maintenance strategy is high maintenance cost and low availability of plant equipment’s.
There are many definitions of preventive maintenance, but all preventive maintenance strategies are time driven. In other words, maintenance tasks are executed on time or hours of operation.
The mean time to failure (MTTF) in above figure indicates that a new machine has a high probability of failure, because of installation problems, during the first few weeks of operation. After this initial period of operation, the probability of failure is low for an extended period. Following this normal machine life period, the probability of failure increases exponentially with elapsed time. In preventive maintenance program, machine repairs or rebuilds are scheduled based on the MTTF statistic.
The actual implementation of preventive maintenance varies greatly. Some programs are extremely limited and consist of minor inspections and lubrications. More comprehensive preventive maintenance programs include major repairs, part replacement, calibration, and machine rebuild for all critical machinery in the plant.
The problem with this approach is that the mode of operation and system or plant-specific variables directly affect the normal operating life of machinery. The mean time between failures (MTBF) will not be the same for pumps that handles water and one that handles abrasive slurries.
Like preventive maintenance, predictive maintenance strategy has many definitions. To some, predictive maintenance is monitoring the vibration of rotating machinery to detect incipient problems and to prevent catastrophic failure. To others, it monitors infrared image of electrical switchgears, motors, and other electrical equipment to detect issues. The main aim of Predictive maintenance strategy is to improve productivity, product quality, and overall effectiveness of our manufacturing and production plants.
Predictive maintenance is a philosophy or attitude that, simply stated, uses the actual operating condition of plant equipment and Maintenance Fundamentals systems to optimize total plant operation. Comprehensive predictive maintenance strategies consist of combination of the most cost-effective tools, that is, vibration monitoring, thermography, oil analysis, etc. to obtain the actual operating condition of critical plant systems, and based on these actual data, plan all maintenance activities on an as-needed basis.
One way to reduce maintenance cost is to extend the useful life of plant equipment. Nidhix will help your organisation implement programs that will increase the useful life of all plant assets. These programs are as below: