4 tips for your industrial equipment maintenance plan

An industrial plant maintenance plan is a vital part of your strategy to keep all processes optimized and bring the plant to its full potential.

In this article, we share our recommendations to optimize your industrial machinery maintenance plan.

Take advantage of downtime in your machinery maintenance plan
We all know that sometimes maintenance personnel can have some time off or commonly called “downtime” in their schedules between reviews.

These times are an excellent opportunity for staff to use them in a useful way in a series of activities that will help them be more productive:

• Make the provisioning and relevant preparations before the maintenance rounds: preparing all the materials, equipment, tools, and personnel that will be necessary for them.
• Planning of the following activities to be carried out.
• Train and inform the person l giving talks on security and certifications.

Stick to Maintenance Dates
It is important that the maintenance department fully complies with the dates on which it has scheduled the maintenance of the equipment to carry out a correct execution of the plan that has been so carefully established.

To achieve this, the following is important:

• Seek the support of management and/or operations direction to support the department with the scheduled dates to avoid logistics problems with the personnel that operate the machinery and avoid unnecessary production stoppages.
• Have everything you need ready before the maintenance date: personnel, tools, external resources, etc.
• Just as maintenance dates are important, so are subsequent feedback activities, so we recommend including them in planning and sticking to them to the letter.

Avoid workarounds
We all know that sometimes workarounds in which an improvised problem is solved in an unexpected extreme situation with a procedure outside of safety standards and procedures are necessary to avoid extremely undesirable consequences.

This is not bad, since with this type of provisional solutions the objective is fulfilled, which is to overcome the difficulty of the moment, but they can become a problem when they go from being a temporary fix to being a permanent solution since these, they are potential generators of accidents that can be even more expensive than the proper long-term solution.

Therefore, it is advisable to always try to make a definitive arrangement at the first opportunity and by the safety rules to avoid accidents and loss of time, resources, productivity, etc.

We understand that they are sometimes necessary, but in general, we recommend that you not resort to these types of solutions very often because they relax the culture of following the norms and standards of the staff.

Build credibility as a department
A common problem that the maintenance departments of companies often experience is the lack of seriousness with which the other areas of the company take their activities and planning.

To have authority and credibility as a department, it is important that your team documents its maintenance plan in detail and reviews it with the managers to obtain their support and approval, this will help them generate greater trust and respect from the staff of the other departments.

When all stages of the plan are executed according to plan in terms of time and costs, the performance rates of the machinery begin to increase and the failure rates decrease, this will convey the seriousness with which the maintenance team takes their work and will help them position themselves as a vital department for the productivity and operations of the plant. Stalwart International, One of the best Chemical Process Equipment Manufacturer in India.