Learn how to use best practice Precision Maintenance and Precision Reliability Skills in Industrial Operations.
There is no doubt that Precision Maintenance used proactively can massively reduce production outages and maintenance costs. It totally stops equipment failures—you get zero breakdowns—and permanently lifts production throughput.
Once your maintenance crew have learned precision maintenance skills, and you refocus your maintenance strategy onto defect elimination and failure prevention, you will drive equipment failure out of your business. The causes of machinery and mechanical equipment failure, like the common ones shown in the image below, will be removed by doing high maintenance work quality.
The issues that concern people with the implementation of Precision Maintenance is that it is supposedly time consuming, expensive and it takes precious manpower resources. We instead tell clients that introducing precision maintenance is not that difficult, nor too expensive, nor does it require a lot of effort. We know that because we have a simple process to introduce precision skills into companies.
At Lifetime Reliability Solutions we employ a simple strategy to introduce precision maintenance into your operation in 100 days—we let you tradespeople and operators test it. We provide the change management method and the procedural tools that let you and your people introduce, use, prove and adopt precision maintenance into your operation in 100 days so everyone can see the reliability improvements and cost savings it brings.
Many companies put their people through reliability skills improvement training. They send their maintenance technicians on precision skills development believing it will change their operation and make its equipment more reliable. It might even work for a while, but mysteriously it never lasts. We do it differently so that the reliability skills training always stay with you by putting precision requirements into your standard operating procedures.
We put selected managers, supervisors and shopfloor people into a project team and we work with them using the Change to Win Workbook to guide the introduction and testing of precision maintenance in 100-days. The team members explore precision maintenance in detail for themselves. They plan the project, they cost the project and they decide to willing take-on its introduction and the necessary training and methods required. The team drives the change. The workbook is just a tool to get people to work together, and the facilitator (yourself perhaps) guides the team and keeps them on-track. It is a process aimed at getting change happening in a company by using its own people to trial a new idea/method in a 100 day project. Once the project is successful it is rolled-out across the operation. It is a change management method that applies to any situation needing to be improved.
With precision maintenance your machinery maintenance costs drop and you get failure-free production equipment
The precision maintenance program is something the team develops, tests and proves before the company commits to its business-wide use. We have seen too many managers rush-in new ideas and then watched them die because they never first set the operation up for a successful introduction. With a team approach the people in the operation have to buy into the change and make it happen. It saves companies a lot of time and money and is far more successful compared to shoe-horning change into place.
The precision maintenance program starts by educating site management with a one-day seminar, and then putting the team through a two-day course on precision maintenance. Once the team understands what needs to be done, they work with the facilitator to develop a plan and conduct the first trials in the workplace. You bring-in outside expert trainers for such things as shaft alignment training and precision bearing installation training, and work with competent service providers for needs like wear particle analysis, oil analysis, etc. The people on the team put the program together, and they get the funding and training commitment it will need. We facilitate teams and also work with the organisation’s management to keep them informed during the planning and test phases, as the team works its way through to completion in 100 days.
Our speciality is Precision Maintenance implementation and the change management process it needs if it is to be done successfully. Precision Maintenance introduction requires planning, preparation, authorisation from all parties, and training to make people competent in doing their new roles and duties.
Outstanding equipment reliability and plant availability are the result of building work processes that deliver less equipment maintenance for less cost! You actually design your maintenance management strategy and work processes to give you less maintenance and more reliability.
It may sound crazy to expect less maintenance, but with precision maintenance in place to produce high equipment reliability, you will stop your equipment breakdowns, make on-time deliveries, produce first-pass, right-first-time quality product and meet all your monthly maintenance budget targets.
When you put into place sound precision maintenance management strategies to systematically reduce maintenance and replace it with equipment reliability, you will get consistently great equipment performance and plant availability! Successful precision maintenance show-up as exceptionally high plant utilization, best-in-class equipment reliability, high-quality production, greatly reduced waste, far lower maintenance cost and much higher profit margins.
Successful enterprise asset management is all about stopping maintenance and reliability problems getting into your operation to start with. Once the problems are there it becomes very hard to get rid of them. But get rid of them you must. Precision Maintenance will both stop and remove equipment failure causes for you!
When client’s get concerned as to whether Precision Maintenance is worth the effort we tell them this story from Mike Sondalini:
“I had an interesting experience back in 2002 when visiting a Sumitomo Chemicals plant in Japan on a work assignment. I saw that a maintenance technician had changed out a cavitating pump and I asked my guide what condition monitoring they did on the pump. His reply sent shivers of excitement up my spine. He said to me that since they had used reverse dial indicators to align the pump and applied precision maintenance on it they did not condition monitor it with technical equipment. Sensory observation by their operators was sufficient condition monitoring.
“Their experience had taught them that because it was assembled and installed as perfectly as it possibly could; using Condition Monitoring (CM) during operation offered no added advantage. Sumitomo did use CM extensively in their business, but not on that pump which had been precision maintained. It made me realise that Precision Maintenance, with its focus on defect elimination, is the way of the future for progressive operations.”
Precision Maintenance is the best investment you can make in your business because its returns are measured in the 100’s of percent, and often 1,000’s, as productivity improves massively with only minor capital spend on a few tools and low-cost items of equipment. Precision Maintenance delivers the highest equipment reliability and the lowest maintenance costs of all the maintenance strategies.
Precision Maintenance prevents equipment problems starting, it solves the equipment problems you have, and that means you get more production, for less cost, and you need fewer maintainers.This is how Precision Maintenance achieves its cost and productivity improvements …
- Breakdowns never happen
- Accidents and injury incidents disappear
- More production is output from machines as they considerably increase their run time between failure
- Condition Monitoring tasks disappear, which saves the cost of using CM technicians
- Downtime becomes production uptime with plant availability / plant uptime are maximized
- Waste and scrap turn into first-pass, best-quality product always coming from equipment
- Undercapacity turns into full capacity with equipment performance consistently up to nameplate rate
- You need less parts, less warehousing, less maintainers since machines don’t fail
- Precision maintenance becomes standard practice for the operation and problems are spotted and fixed well before equipment performance is affected.
You can find out a whole lot more about precision maintenance from our Introduction of a Precision Maintenance Strategy training course PPT (PowerPoint) presentation. available for purchase at the online store.
For more details about successful Precision Maintenance implementations, or to request a free report on introducing Precision Maintenance into your business, contact Lifetime Reliability Solutions using the details at the Contact Us page.
My best regards to you,
Mike Sondalini
Managing Director
Lifetime Reliability Solutions HQ
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