Maintenance Management: How To#

Proper maintenance of equipment is critical to maintain the health and performance of the manufacturing assets and to reduce unplanned downtime. There are four different types of maintenance: corrective, preventive, condition based and predictive. Corrective maintenance is performed for unplanned downtime; preventive maintenance is based on pre-defined time and usage schedules; condition-based is triggered when certain conditions are observed; and predictive maintenance relies in the application of a predictive maintenance to estimate the remaining useful life and failure probabilities. A maintenance involves the execution of a set of tasks as defined in a checklist, the replacement of spare parts, and the collection of data either for historical or verification purposes.

The Maintenance Management module supports the creation of maintenance plans with each plan consisting of a set of maintenance activities. The MES will enforce that the maintenance plan is followed as defined and it will keep a track of the maintenance history for every equipment. Being an integrated module, the usage counters are automatically increased by the system as material is processed and equipment can be prevented from being used if maintenance is due. Furthermore, the system can check the certifications of the maintenance technicians; update the inventory of the spare parts as they are consumed. The planned maintenance down times are supplied to the scheduling module so that they are handled as equipment unavailability.

Available guides#

Table: Maintenance Management: How To guides