Overcoming Reactive Maintenance Challenges | Quality Digest

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In the absence of a full preventive maintenance plan, an FMECA study could help you identify failure modes that pose serious safety risks so you can coordinate maintenance-related work. In essence, this study lets you rank failure risks by their criticality so you can detect, prevent, and reduce the severity of failure.

For more critical assets, a preventive approach to maintenance is typically best for maintaining operating conditions.

Reactive maintenance management vs. preventive maintenance management

How can preventive maintenance help?

You can mitigate these risks by incorporating preventive maintenance tools into your inventory management strategy. For instance, a parts management module can help you optimize spare stock levels by providing purchase prompts based on current inventory and disposal advice for parts that remain unused.

Reactive maintenance simply doesn’t allow data-driven insight into asset performance, condition, or health. Business owners who take this approach place their productivity and profitability at the mercy of their equipment.

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Using a reactive maintenance strategy can complicate inventory management. When you forego routine inspections or maintenance, it can be difficult to anticipate which spare parts you should hold in stock and in what quantity. Businesses using a reactive maintenance approach risk carrying excess inventory or falling short when critical spares are needed. Either condition can have negative consequences.

3. Handling operational disruptions

With a reactive maintenance workflow, maintenance is only performed after a malfunction or failure has already occurred. This minimizes initial costs and simplifies maintenance requirements while the parts or equipment in question are running. However, with reactive maintenance, little is done to prevent the occurrence of breakdown or failure. As a result, malfunctions often lead to significant downtime.

A reactive maintenance strategy may reduce your maintenance staffing needs while your equipment is functional. When malfunctions and breakdowns occur, however, your maintenance team’s plans may be thrown into disarray.

1. Managing spare parts inventory

Published Feb. 15, 2024, by Limble.

How can preventive maintenance help?

Evaluate the potential of your assets to fail, the likely causes of failure, and the impacts on workplace safety by conducting a failure mode effects and criticality (FMECA) study. The FMECA is a formal qualitative method of carrying out a what-if analysis on your assets and tracking failures to their root causes.

How can preventive maintenance help?

2. Optimizing technician workloads

5. Lack of insights into asset performance and failure modes

Even under optimal conditions, reactive maintenance presents specific challenges in areas like inventory management, operational continuity, and workplace safety. Photo credit: ThisisEngineering RAEng.

You’ll be able to control your spend, streamline communication with service providers, and ultimately connect assets with vendors that are responsible for maintaining them. This puts you in a position to swiftly deploy maintenance, repairs, and task reallocation when equipment failures and other maintenance issues occur. You may also be able to optimize your technician workloads by taking advantage of the calendar-based maintenance services that are often included in your service contract.

Reactive maintenance produces variability in when, how, and why equipment fails. The result is an uneven and scattered approach to initiating maintenance work and resuming normal operation.

Even under optimal conditions, reactive maintenance presents specific challenges in areas like inventory management, operational continuity, and workplace safety. Preventive maintenance strategies can help mitigate these challenges.

Aging equipment can lead to heightened safety risks. This is especially true of machinery that is poorly monitored and maintained.

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4. Keeping the workplace safe

You can prepare for shifting technician workloads by integrating smart vendor management software into your maintenance program. An effective vendor management application should allow you to easily track and manage service contracts and contractors and oversee work order management.

Maintenance software like a CMMS provides real-time access performance to enable process improvements and empower a transition to more predictive maintenance. These data are invaluable for making proactive decisions regarding maintenance and repairs while supporting the transformation of your maintenance program as a whole.

More reasons to implement a preventive maintenance program

Whether your equipment relies on high-pressure hydraulics and spinning rotors or high-speed blades and abrasive chemicals, malfunctions can cause injuries to operators and pose an environmental hazard. Here, a reactive maintenance policy may be unsafe, and can even expose you to legal liability.

Some of this inconsistency can be mitigated with a well-planned failure maintenance program. A failure maintenance program can also help you counterbalance some of the heavier costs of reactive maintenance, such as the reduced life expectancy of your equipment or the prolonging of unplanned downtime.

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How can preventive maintenance help?