Table Of ContentWorld Class
Maintenance Management
World Class
Maintenance Management
McGraw Hill Education (India) Private Limited
NEW DELHI
McGraw Hill Education Offi ces
New Delhi New York St Louis San Francisco Auckland Bogotá Caracas
Kuala Lumpur Lisbon London Madrid Mexico City Milan Montreal
San Juan Santiago Singapore Sydney Tokyo Toronto
To
My Wife Jaya
Who encouraged me to write this book
On
World Class Maintenance
and gave me relentless support to help me in completing this
manuscript
Preface
In the modern competitive world there is a continuous need to reduce
manufacturing costs.
There is humungous pressure on the manufacturing function to come
out with innovative ideas to cut costs. However, due to ever increasing
labor cost, material cost, and overhead costs, the pressure to save money
always persist. All functions in manufacturing generate cost saving ideas
every year and implement them. This becomes a constant endeavor and
such “cost saving” projects are essential for the survival of the busi-
ness.
However, many industries do not understand or they are not aware
of one big opportunity area. That is achieving major maintenance cost
reduction and thereby achieving huge manufacturing cost reduction.
This is done by implementing a “World Class Maintenance Management
System” in the manufacturing plant. This is not understood clearly by
many industries. They know that there is an opportunity to reduce cost
of maintenance by reducing wastages in maintenance function. How-
ever, the huge opportunity to reduce the manufacturing cost especially
in a plant where there is capacity crunch is not appreciated by all.
“Zero-breakdown” is not just a buzz word but reality today and this zero
breakdown concept can bring about huge saving in manufacturing cost.
In the industrial world, the awareness about the importance of
maintenance function is rapidly increasing. However, in practice, the ef-
fectiveness of the maintenance function varies a lot. In some industries
there is enough importance given to this function and the results show
for themselves. In some other industries, it is even today considered
to be a department which incurs a lot of expenses year after year. The
maintenance function is considered to be a back of the house function.
There is no proper accountability for the work. Mainly the work is at-
tending breakdowns. Whenever the production department calls upon
for help from maintenance department, the maintenance crew attends
the breakdown and fi xes the problem. So maintenance crew waits for the
breakdown to take place and then act. This is reactive response rather
than proactive response.
The objective of this book is to emphasize the need for a full fl edged
maintenance management system. The captioned subject is getting a
lot of importance in the recent years. Objectives, like achieving zero
breakdowns, enhancing the life of critical components, analyzing the
breakdowns using appropriate tools and reducing cost of maintenance
are clearly laid out. Availability and reliability of plant and equipment
are getting tremendous importance. In this book an attempt has been
made to provide a comprehensive system for an effi cient and effective
maintenance management. The objective here is not just to provide a few
tools for doing good maintenance, but here honest effort has been made
to provide a comprehensive system in order to completely revamp the
ancient maintenance management system from the basics. This kind of
all encompassing system is very useful when you are starting a new plant
or whenever a complete revamping is needed in an old running plant.
Maintenance is considered to be an expense department. We realize
that it is not a profi t center. However, if you go into details of wastages (or
losses) taking place due to breakdowns in a busy manufacturing plant it is
obvious that a big amount of savings can be achieved by just eliminating
breakdowns. Often we fi nd that the maintenance budget is slashed and
this function is put under tremendous pressure to cut costs. However, by
implementing world class maintenance system not only the maintenance
cost comes down but also the manufacturing cost comes down drastically
and such savings directly go to the bottom line. There have been cases
where savings to the tune of 10% to 25% of the manufacturing costs have
been achieved.
The top management needs to understand the importance fi rst. They
then institute a good maintenance system and start implementing it.
This is not rocket science. However, changing the culture of the organi-
zation needs relentless effort from the management. This may need to
bring about a change in the leadership style. This may also need focus
on training to develop a good system including training on some good
maintenance skills.
There is a saying that good maintenance starts at the design stage
of the equipment. The question is how on earth the users of equipment,
contribute to the design of equipment which is generally done by the
manufacturer of the equipment. If you need a trouble free equipment
with all the defects on operability, maintainability, reliability and easy to
inspect properly addressed in the design stage itself and then delivered
to the user, you as a user need to get involved in developing the design.
This is called MP design and the user needs to get involved in that MP
design.
The world class maintenance system is not “one size fi t all” kind of
system and needs a lot of work in conceiving, designing and implement-
ing this system as per the business need of your organization. This takes
about one to two years to do this. So initially there will be an “investment”
for a year or two and later after two years there will be harvesting and
that continues forever. However, in order to get the savings year after year
sustenance becomes very important. A good sustenance system should be
in place in order to continuously achieve savings in future.
In this initial period there has to be a thorough leadership drive to
implement this system. The science of maintenance is ever developing
and one needs to be in touch with the latest developments in the fi eld of
maintenance in order to sustain results. In this book it has been addressed
as to “How to Sustain” good results achieved in detail.
The author humbly expects that this world class maintenance system
will be of use to your organization in reducing the manufacturing cost by
achieving zero breakdowns and enhancing the life of equipment.
