The more effectively you can maintain your assets, the better, since doing so takes a lot of time and work. The field of maintenance management might assist you in this regard. To maximize the effectiveness of your assets while keeping expenses in check, you need a system for planning and supervising their routine maintenance.
Let’s go into more detail about what is meant by the word “maintenance management,” which industries use it, and how you may make improvements at your own organization.
What is Maintenance Management?
Planning, scheduling, and overseeing the upkeep of machinery and vehicles is what we call “maintenance management.”
Preventative maintenance entails planning ahead for future problems and then carrying out those plans on a regular basis.
Simply having your fleet’s oil changed and checked regularly is a good illustration of this. Machine learning is used in more advanced tactics to determine which components are under the greatest strain and will soon need to be replaced.
Increased access to real-time information may help you simplify and save money on maintenance tasks. However, this isn’t the only factor that makes it crucial for commercial enterprises.
Types of Maintenance Management
There are four distinct approaches to maintenance management that may be used alone or in concert to help businesses create a maintenance plan that meets their needs and stays within their budget.
- Reactive maintenance (RM)
When an asset breaks down, it’s time for some reactive maintenance, also called corrective maintenance. For the most part, RM is applied to less important, non-critical machinery that has little bearing on the company’s bottom line.
- Preventative maintenance(PM)
Repairs are scheduled on a regular basis to avoid breakdowns and unanticipated downtime as part of preventative maintenance. It focuses on crucial machinery that has a heavy financial and operational influence on the company.
The PM maintenance plan documents the OEM-recommended interval between oil changes. This interval is typically measured in miles or kilometers driven.
- Predictive maintenance (PdM)
In predictive maintenance, IoT sensors and analytics programs are used to monitor machinery in real time in order to spot any degradation or abnormalities that might lead to a breakdown in accordance with the program’s preset failure thresholds.
In contrast to PM, PdM takes a condition-based maintenance approach using oil analysis to recommend an oil change based on actual vehicle performance rather than just how much time has passed since the previous one.
Early adopters of PdM technologies may be found in asset- and energy-intensive sectors, such as the oil, gas, power, and manufacturing industries, due to the vast potential of these tools to enhance asset performance, worker safety, and energy usage optimization.
- Reliability- centered maintenance (RCM)
To maximize the asset’s reliability, maintenance plans are tailored to it. The long-term goal is to identify potential points of failure in order to improve the equipment’s overall safety and dependability.
Benefits of Maintenance Management
Examining the advantages of a well-functioning asset maintenance management system is a good place to start.
1. Increased output from both labor and capital
Unexpected equipment failures pose a hazard to the health and safety of workers and customers in the retail and industrial sectors, and have a direct negative effect on the bottom line as a result of interruptions to business operations.
In the workplace, poor maintenance may lead to issues like inadequate lighting, uncomfortably cold or hot HVAC systems, and many electrical and fire dangers, all of which disrupt operations and reduce employee productivity.
The safety, health, and productivity of every person and piece of equipment in your building might hinge on the efficacy of your facility’s maintenance management system, which can help you spot problems before they escalate into full-blown breakdowns.
2. Decreased running expenses
If you’re in a run-to-failure maintenance situation and need a replacement component for your equipment, then the expense of your emergency maintenance work will skyrocket.
The price of expedited shipment for a replacement component is more than for regular shipping if you don’t already have it in stock. Not only that, but companies stand to lose a lot of money when activities are suspended until the broken component is fixed.
Preventative maintenance extends the useful life of assets by keeping them operating as the original designers intended and minimizing the likelihood of failure and associated downtime.
3. Lengthened the usefulness of assets
Maintenance metrics and key performance indicators such as mean time between failure (MTBF), mean time to repair (MTR), and Remaining Useful Life (RUL) are used by facility management (FM) and operations and maintenance (O&M) teams to monitor the health and effectiveness of physical assets over time.
To guarantee that each asset serves its purpose and is maintained for its expected lifetime with low operating expenses, CMMS software is often used for tracking and computing these.
Boost productivity
Decisions about operations and maintenance (O&M) that are informed by data may boost an organization’s productivity. Maintainability problems with a single asset may be better comprehended and avoided by reviewing the related maintenance management records.
As an added bonus, if an asset is underperforming in terms of projected returns, it may be swapped out with a newer, more efficient model rather than having to be extensively maintained.
Real-time data also shows how well your maintenance program is doing and how you can apply what you’ve learned about one asset class to similar ones in other buildings to create a portfolio that really performs.
Maintenance Management vs Asset Management
Working with assets to increase their dependability is a significant part of maintenance management. The two are not identical in any way.
Asset management is the process of keeping tabs on how well an organization’s assets are doing and adjusting operations accordingly. To guarantee the company’s performance, asset management systems should be synchronized with the overarching business strategy. Benefits that may be seen via asset management methods include whether or not the equipment is functioning as intended, whether or not running expenses have been decreased, and whether or not a greater return on investment (ROI) is being obtained on the assets.
Maintenance management is keeping tabs on a company’s assets including personnel, materials, and equipment via the use of user-friendly software like CMMS. The data collected by this system may help guide the development of new maintenance procedures or the enhancement of existing ones. Proper management of maintenance keeps your company’s machinery in top shape and reduces the frequency of breakdowns and unplanned repairs.
Just what is the dissimilarity, then? Maintenance management and asset management are two distinct disciplines, however they typically work together seamlessly. Asset management examines all the data for the work that needs to be done on each asset, identifying and prioritizing that work to aid with the ROI of each asset, whereas maintenance management focuses more on the physical performance and maintenance of equipment.
Most contemporary CMMS programs combine the two features, allowing maintenance workers to see both types of information in a single interface.
What is Maintenance Management software or CMMS help?
As a centralized system, maintenance management software (also known as CMMS software) helps businesses simplify and manage maintenance activities across portfolios.
Tracking assets, planning maintenance, managing repair orders, and much more can all be automated with one one system. In addition, it allows the technicians, suppliers, and office staff to easily coordinate efforts and move maintenance work forward without delays.
However, you may feel overwhelmed by the abundance of CMMS vendors, both on-premise and cloud-based.
Conclusion
Maintaining your assets and resources effectively is the job of maintenance management. The primary goal is to optimize your maintenance procedures such that they are efficient, cost-effective, and fail-safe while still meeting all of your service expectations.
The health of your company depends critically on the effectiveness of your maintenance procedures. If done properly, it may help you keep expenditures in check, ensure the safety of your employees, and lengthen the useful life of your assets.
