Good Monday morning and I hope everyone is healthy. I also hope your machines and equipment are healthy too. If you are a reactive organization your equipment may not even start back up when this shutdown is over. And if it doesn’t, whose fault is it going to be?
If you want a return on your investment, then minimize your reactive maintenance.
Here are some reasons why this is critical:
• Emergency repairs can cost three to more than ten times that of planned maintenance. It’s at least six times more expensive to operate with a highly reactive maintenance process.
• There are also related costly production losses, since most reactive maintenance means that the equipment is down. These losses can be five to 20 times more than the cost of performing the proper maintenance.
• Unplanned repairs are more time consuming.
• Rework due to insufficient root-cause analysis will result in having to fix it all over again.
• Lack of precision maintenance techniques causes premature failure of the equipment. That requires such practices as always applying correct torques and tensions on your components and proper tolerances at operating temperature. These things are often not done with precision when in emergency mode.
• Backlog will increase since you are using resources that were originally designated for other functions.
• It’s difficult to control costs with a high number of unexpected failures.
• Proper maintenance practices relate to lower energy costs.
• By doing maintenance too often, you are most likely re-introducing some form of infant mortality into your equipment. This may lead to additional reactive maintenance.
• Too often, reactive-maintenance-related data does not get properly entered the maintenance computer system for further analysis.
• Reactive maintenance increases costs for spare parts because you are frequently expediting delivery and/or increasing inventory.
• Increased reactive maintenance is directly related to a rise in safety issues.
• Running to failure and praising “firefighting” repairs will never change the culture to following standardized best practices.
• Supporting reactive maintenance is counter to the knowledge that reliability/maintenance is everyone’s responsibility.
• Cumulatively, all the negative things (decreased safety, poor culture, reduced capacity, increased process variability and lower quality, and higher cost) tied to reactive maintenance move your process to a downward spiral.
There are more negative impacts of highly reactive maintenance practices, but the ones listed above should be enough to motivate some improvement. So many parts of your organization can benefit from improving just this one key performance indicator. Don't forget to pass this on to your managers, let's change things for the better.
Comments