What is the Need for & Importance of Maintenance Management?

Regular maintenance of assets is a mandatory action to keep a business growing. Maintenance of assets is undertaken by organizations to keep their performance optimized, thereby minimizing failures. This, in turn, leads to effective performance from the assets.

What is Maintenance Management?

The word maintenance does not always mean repair. What maintenance really means is to follow up with regular or methodological processes to keep equipment up to date and in working condition. It does not only mean repairing equipment when it is broken. The priority of effort and time should be on maintenance rather than repair. The equipment should be lined and labeled; its wearing surfaces should be examined and replaced; oil schedules should be lined up at regular intervals. Hence, equipment in good working conditions requires regular inspection and adjustment to continue to produce good quality products for a long time.

What is the use of Maintenance Management?

The main aim of equipment maintenance is to maintain the functionality of the equipment and to minimize its breakdowns. For mechanical equipment, maintenance management will involve repair, replacement, and servicing of tools. It also ensures the proper working and intercepts fluctuations that occur in the duration of the production process. The fact remains that any kind of change, even a minor downtime, could reduce the overall efficiency of machines, which would lead to major production losses. Therefore, it is important for organizations today to adopt and implement a good maintenance management strategy. Without, or in the absence of, equipment management, it might be possible to face consequences as a result of careless decisions. Some of them are:

• Production loss
• Rescheduling of whole projects
• Material wastage from resources that have not been used yet
• Overtime of labor because of downtime
• Disposal of machinery and equipment before the end of its useful life

How to plan and plot the Maintenance Management program?

You can avoid these kinds of mishaps by strategizing an equipment maintenance system in your organization or government organizations. There are a few points you will need to know and remember while programming equipment maintenance in your business.

• To plan and set some quality and usage standards for the staff internally, based upon your asset type. This way, the asset will be operated in the appropriate manner, reducing the chances of its misuse and downtime.
• To conduct careful repairing, when proper consultation is done from the side of the concerned department. This way, your maintenance projects will be properly scheduled and will determine the need for subcontracting whenever needed.
• To document all activities thoroughly. It will make it easier for you to track the repair history and calculate depreciation for timely disposal. The centralized system will automatically update the asset records; therefore, you should look for an online system provider.
• To complete all the daily tasks and more, within their deadlines, in order to stick to the maintenance plan. This completion of tasks on time will minimize your waste of repair resources.

These objectives are of most use for your business; you can cut the large-scale replacement costs to a greater extent and even generate high revenues by raising the overall productivity.

Categories of Maintenance:

There are two main categories of maintenance:

1. Primary functions
   • Equipment inspection, cleaning, and lubrication
   • Alterations to existing types of equipment and buildings
   • Maintenance of existing buildings and grounds
   • Maintenance of existing plant and equipment
   • New installations of equipment and buildings
   • Generation and distribution of utilities
2. Secondary Functions
   • Property accounting
   • Insurance administration against theft, fire, etc.
   • Storekeeping for maintenance purposes
   • Plant protection against fire, etc.
   • Pollution and noise control
   • Waste disposal
   • Salvage
   • Providing caretaker services
   • Any other services concerning maintenance as delegated by plant management

Industries in which Maintenance Management is used or required:

Some examples of the industries that use maintenance management are:

• Food Processing Industry: It includes heavy machinery, mobile equipment, and handheld tools which require equipment maintenance.
• Plastics Manufacturing Industry: Plastics manufacturing plants use a wide range of heavy as well as lightweight equipment, which needs to be regularly serviced.
• Steel Mills Industry: Maintenance work in steel fabrication plants services all the equipment from hot rollers and furnaces to the portable tools.
• Restaurants Industry: There are many types of equipment that are used in commercial kitchens which need to be kept in a working position so that they can provide the appropriate service. Regular equipment maintenance also helps restaurants maintain their regulatory compliance.
• Construction Industry: There are heavy mobile equipment, handheld power tools, and safety gear required on the field of the construction site which comply with their good working conditions so as to operate efficiently.
• Automobile Manufacturing Industry: To fabricate and assemble any vehicle, the parts required should be finely tuned equipment. Therefore, to meet the production demand, the best way is to implement good equipment maintenance management to get the equipment serviced and repaired regularly.
• Workshops Industry: Workshops use a variety of tools to produce various items, for example, woodwork, metal products, blown glass, etc. For good quality production, their tools need to be kept in top condition, and this can be easily achieved through maintenance management.

Importance of Maintenance Management

Many organizations still believe in the old methodologies which suggest not fixing anything unless it's broken. But breaking this myth, we will suggest you go for preventive maintenance management as it has many benefits:

• Operator and Machine Safety: By performing regular preventive maintenance, you will always be assured that your equipment will operate under safe conditions, both for the machine and the operators. Possible issues can be cut off before they tend to cause any harm, without taking any chances.
• Machine Efficiency: With normal wear and tear, machines can cause lower efficiency. Proper preventive maintenance management will assure you of the optimal working conditions of the equipment and moreover, conserves its lifespan.
• Time Savings: Planned preventive maintenance management will reduce the actual downtime caused by breakdowns and further enhance the products, too, in less time, thereby saving a lot of time. Preventative maintenance will consume less time than the time taken in emergency repairs and replacements.

Important Functions of Maintenance Management in Asset Management

• Develops maintenance policies, procedures, and standards for the maintenance as well as the asset management system.
• Schedules the maintenance work after getting the right consultation from the concerned production departments.
• Carries out the repairs and corrects the planned equipment to achieve the required level of availability and optimum operational efficiency.
• Ensures scheduled inspection, lubrication & oil checking, and adjustment of all the machinery and equipment.
• Documents and maintains the record of every maintenance activity i.e., repairs, replacement, overhauls, modifications, and lubrication, etc.
• Maintains and carries out repairs of buildings, utilities, material handling equipment, and other service facilities such as electrical installations, sewers, central stores, and roadways, etc.
• Carries out and facilitates regular inspections of equipment and facilities to know their conditions if there is any failure or stoppage in production.
• Prepares the inventory list of spare parts and materials that are required for maintenance.
• Ensures cost-effective maintenance.
• Forecasts the maintenance expenditure and prepares a budget and to ensure the expenditure according to the planned budget.
• Implements safety standards as needed for the use of specific equipment such as boilers, overhead cranes, and chemical plants, etc.
• Develops the management information systems, to provide information to top management related to the maintenance activities.
• Monitors the equipment's condition at regular intervals.
• Ensures proper inventory control of spare parts and other materials as required.

Conclusion:

Maintenance management and asset management are technically different systems but still, they interrelate and work well together. Asset management software helps in analyzing the data related to the performance of assets in the required work. Whereas maintenance management software helps in guiding the physical performance of the equipment with its related activities and efficiencies regarding their maintenance. Therefore, to document all your activities thoroughly and to make it easier, to track the repair history and calculate depreciation for timely disposal, you need a centralized system that will automatically update the asset records.‍