Page 403 - Intro Predictive Maintenance

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WORLD-CLASS MAINTENANCE

Good maintenance is good business. The prime motivator in manufacturing, especially
as it pertains to equipment maintenance, is to keep production running in high gear.
Competition mandates it. Maintenance directly affects the productivity, quality, and
direct costs of production. Yet, today the most commonly practiced approach to main-
tenance continues to be purely reactive (i.e., an almost universal focus on equipment
breakdowns). This breakdown maintenance mentality stands in direct opposition to
the target of high productivity. The postmortem being that production stops and the
maintenance department draws exceptional and unwanted visibility created by the
extraordinary costs that such practices incur in terms of competitiveness and real
dollars.

18.1 WHAT IS WORLD-CLASS MAINTENANCE?
To keep production in high gear—and to survive—manufacturers are increasingly
obliged to move from a breakdown maintenance mindset toward a concept of proac-
tive maintenance organized around a well-trained staff, within a carefully defined plan,
and with meaningful participation of employees outside of what is normally thought
of as traditional maintenance. It’s a move toward a total team approach of effective
preventive maintenance and total quality management (TQM).

At the core of world-class maintenance is a new partnership among the manufactur-
ing or production people, maintenance, engineering, and technical services to improve
what is called overall equipment effectiveness (OEE). It is a program of zero break-
downs and zero defects aimed at improving or eliminating the six crippling shop-floor
losses:

• Equipment breakdowns
• Setup and adjustment slowdowns
• Idling and short-term stoppages

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