Page 405 - Intro Predictive Maintenance

396 An Introduction to Predictive Maintenance

in the maintenance activity—in the plan, in the program, in the partnership, but not
necessarily in the physical act of maintaining equipment.

18.2.3 Improving Maintenance Efficiency and Effectiveness
In most world-class organizations, the operator is directly involved in some level of
maintenance. This effort involves better planning and scheduling, better preventive
maintenance, predictive maintenance, reliability-centered maintenance, spare parts
equipment stores, tool locations—the collective domain of the maintenance depart-
ment and the maintenance technologies.

18.2.4 Educating and Training
This is perhaps the most important task in the world-class approach. It involves every-
one in the company: Operators are taught how to operate their machines properly and
maintenance personnel to maintain them properly. Because operators will be per-
forming some of the inspections, routine machine adjustments, and other preventive
tasks, training involves teaching operators how to do those inspections and how to
collaborate with maintenance. Also involved is training supervisors on how to super-
vise in a proactive-type team environment.

18.2.5 Designing and Managing Equipment for Maintenance Prevention
Equipment is costly and should be viewed as a productive asset for its entire life.
Designing equipment that is easier to operate and maintain than previous designs is a
fundamental part of proactive performance. Suggestions from operators and main-
tenance technicians help engineers design, specify, and procure equipment that is more
effective. By evaluating the costs of operating and maintaining the new equipment
throughout its life cycle, long-term costs will be minimized. Low purchase prices do
not necessarily mean low life-cycle costs.

18.3 COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE
In most companies today, management is looking for every possible competitive
advantage. Companies focus on total quality (TQC, TQM), just-in-time (JIT), and total
employee involvement (TEI) programs. All require complete management commit-
ment and support to be successful. Consider the following questions regarding com-
petition and maintenance:

• Is it possible to produce quality products on poorly maintained equipment?
• Can quality products come from equipment that is consistently out of
specification or worn to the point that it cannot consistently hold
tolerance?
• Can a JIT program work with equipment that is unreliable or has low
availability?