In asset-intensive organizations, equipment and heavy machinery undergo abrasion and depreciation, eventually leading to breakdowns. Typically, organizations perform reactive maintenance in this situation that puts a hold on critical business operations and results in lost production hours and reduced output. Implementing scheduled maintenance as part of your company’s proactive maintenance program can be a contrivance to save your facility from unplanned downtime.
Scheduled maintenance is an effective strategy for managing inspection and maintenance effectively. It allows your organization to determine the best technician, time, and strategy for performing maintenance tasks based on the facility’s maintenance needs. Consequently, your organization is facilitated with improved uptime and facility efficiency.
This article discusses the importance of scheduled maintenance and how it enables organizations to streamline their resources for maximum productivity. Let’s dive right in!
What is Scheduled Maintenance?
Scheduled maintenance refers to maintenance tasks that the technicians carry out at a predefined time. The process involves equipment inspection, adjustment, servicing, and planned shutdowns that may be carried off as a one-off job or at regular intervals.
The purpose of scheduled maintenance is to reduce equipment failure, backlogs, and reactive maintenance. For instance, a company may schedule the replacement of the bearings on a conveyor belt every 30 days as part of its scheduled maintenance plan.
This timely scheduled maintenance helps in reducing the chances of the bearing rupturing during the production process. Consequently, the company has saved itself from unplanned downtime and disrupted operations, all thanks to scheduled maintenance!
Companies employ the Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) or an EAM-based software to further enhance the efficiency of scheduled maintenance activities. This automated solution allows the maintenance team to plan, organize, control, and monitor all the maintenance tasks they must undertake regularly.
Scheduled Maintenance Vs. Planned Maintenance
The terms planned maintenance and scheduled maintenance are often used interchangeably, but they differ in a few ways. Let’s break them down individually to avoid confusion.
Planned Maintenance
Planned or preventive maintenance is an anticipatory process that identifies the equipment maintenance needs and streamlines resources to complete them. It involves prioritizing work orders and assessing the effectiveness of maintenance activities.
Planned maintenance comprises various reactive, preventative, and predictive strategies. The process revolves around the realization and allocation of materials, parts, and tools necessary to execute work orders.
Scheduled Maintenance Tasks
Scheduled maintenance is an extension of planned maintenance, focusing on which technician will carry out the maintenance tasks and at what intervals. Contrary to planned maintenance, scheduled maintenance doesn’t involve work and equipment behavior forecasting. It comes into action when a problem has been identified during the inspection. Hence, the maintenance tasks are allotted to a technician to carry out within the scheduled duration.
The Bottom Line: The focal point of planned maintenance is what and how maintenance activities will be performed, while scheduled maintenance concentrates on when and who will carry them out. Hence, the two are interlinked because neither can work without the other. |
Why is Scheduled Maintenance Important for Asset-intensive Organizations?
When equipment is not inspected and maintained at appropriate intervals, it calls for unplanned equipment downtime or out-of-the-schedule maintenance activity. The consequences disrupt the production process causing the company’s upstream processes to pause and downstream processes to turn idle. Ultimately, these hurdles account for revenue loss, accidents, and demurrage.
Meticulously scheduled maintenance can turn the situation around and reduce the effects of the bottleneck created by reactive maintenance. Scheduled maintenance takes planned maintenance one step further, determining the right time to conduct maintenance activities depending on the maintenance task’s urgency, personnel’s availability, and facility locations.
With scheduled inspections and maintenance, manufacturing departments can manage the time dedicated to completing tasks as efficiently as possible. Potential problems become apparent early on before they develop into system failures. Therefore, companies can avoid losses caused by extended unscheduled asset downtime, equipment breakdowns, and accidents.
An effective scheduled maintenance program can also diminish the likelihood of lengthy operation disruptions. Detecting the hidden problems enables maintenance technicians to administer repair work and resolve issues at ideal times. Although there’s still downtime following this strategy, it is planned ahead of time, voiding unnecessary delays and loss of productive hours.
Pro Tip: Employ the NonStop Group’s integrated digital system, “The NonStop Suite,” to make unplanned downtime a thing of the past and unlock efficient scheduled maintenance.
Indispensable Benefits of Scheduled Maintenance
The primary benefit of scheduled maintenance is reduced equipment downtime. Still, a strict maintenance system has other noteworthy effects:
- Scheduled maintenance promotes a work culture of proactive behavior within the maintenance department.
- The risks of flawed products being created through faulty machines go down.
- Maintenance technicians’ idle time during manufacturing is reduced as the equipment remains functional for longer.
- The asset becomes more reliable, and its life expectancy is improved with regular maintenance.
- The absence of overlong equipment downtime decreases the overall maintenance cost.
- Workplace safety improves with the effectiveness of scheduled maintenance.
- As workplace safety increases, the likelihood of worker accidents and costly civil litigation decreases.
- An effectively scheduled maintenance ensures asset compliance and enhanced asset performance.
Pro Tip: Scheduled maintenance software, like The NonStop Suite, is an ideal solution for integrating maintenance procedures and making them more efficient and transparent. Assets, documents, and work orders are consolidated, saving valuable time that would otherwise be spent on administrative tasks.
What is Scheduled Maintenance Critical Percent (SMCP)?
To streamline the path to achieving your company’s maintenance goals, it is integral to identify which equipment needs to be prioritized for maintenance. The Scheduled Maintenance Critical Percent is a tool that helps companies prioritize their regularly scheduled maintenance tasks. Consequently, when a maintenance task is overdue on machinery, the SMCP outlines which activity needs to be dealt with on priority and which can wait.
How to Calculate SMCP?
The SMCP is calculated by adding the number of days a maintenance task has a pending status and the number of days in the maintenance cycle. Mathematically, the SMCP equation is written as:
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SMCP = [(Number of days late + Number of days in the maintenance cycle) ÷ Number of days in the maintenance cycle] x 100 |
Here’s an example to elaborate on how the SMCP highlights which task needs to be carried out first:
Suppose there are two pieces of equipment with scheduled maintenance tasks overdue. One task (Machine A) is scheduled every 30 days but is 5 days late, while the other (Machine B) needs to be done every 60 days but is 7 days late.
Machine A: [(5+30) ÷ 30] x 100 = 116.7%
Machine B: [(7+60) ÷ 60] x 100 = 111.7%
The higher the percentage, the more the maintenance task must be prioritized. Therefore, in this situation, the maintenance tasks for machine A (which is 5 days late) needs to be executed before the maintenance for machine B (which is 7 days late).
Pro Tip: Integrating The NonStop Suite, an EAM-based scheduled maintenance system, can assist your company in creating triggers for scheduled maintenance and streamline your company’s maintenance management system.
3 Key Ways SMCP Assists Companies in Maintenance
Scheduled Maintenance Critical Percentage has several benefits for companies and their maintenance teams, out of which we are enlisting the 3 key ways:
1. Improved Maintenance Schedule
With SMCP, maintenance managers understand which work orders have the most significant impact on operations. Hence, they can schedule maintenance tasks more efficiently, and technicians are assigned respectively. For instance, if the SMCP is high for an activity, you can allocate more resources and maintenance technicians efficiently.
2. Reduced Reactive Repair Costs
SMCP assists in identifying the probability of reactive maintenance, thereby providing the maintenance team a chance to remedy the problem and streamline maintenance cycles. The chances of sudden reactive repair expenses are reduced through maintenance schedules since problems are dealt with quickly before they escalate.
3. Smoother Auditing Process
Overdue equipment maintenance can raise the alarm and cause problems with compliance, ultimately leading to failed compliance audits. When the facility managers track SMCP of all tasks, it becomes easier to identify the ones with urgent health and safety risks. Therefore, the scheduled maintenance task can be taken care of before they slide off the radar, only to emerge as a problem in the auditing process later.
Pro Tip: The NonStop Suite enables your asset-intensive company to uphold compliance, manage permits, and audit documents as per statutory requirements.
Conclusion: Integrate The NonStop Suite for Seamless Maintenance Operations!
Since the productivity of manufacturing companies depends on efficient asset management, The NonStop Suite, the scheduled maintenance software, is an investment worth taking for long-term benefits. This asset-management system enables your company to move away from traditional maintenance management methods and into a new era of increased efficiency, minimum downtime, and reduced repair costs.
The NonStop Suite is an all-inclusive digital solution for your company’s asset maintenance needs. The dynamic eForms allows your manufacturing unit to shift from paper forms to a fully electronic and mobile solution that delivers compliant and audit-ready asset information. The NFC asset tagging system is another remarkable feature that brings you the asset’s maintenance history in one quick scan!
The NonStop Suite enables organizations to track their prized assets in real-time and eliminate the challenges of the maintenance process faced by the manufacturing sector. The comprehensive asset-management solution allows companies to regulate their scheduled maintenance tasks and increase asset uptime. Another upside of using the software is improved employee safety and compliance, facilitating complete transparency of all assets in real-time.
Should your company want to streamline its scheduled maintenance and reap the full benefits of efficient asset management, consult with The NonStop Group today. The free personalized product tour option is also open to you, so you may determine whether The NonStop Suite matches your company’s maintenance needs
