Overcoming Reactive Maintenance Challenges | Quality Digest

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.

By contrast, preventive maintenance strategies, which fall under the umbrella of proactive maintenance, use monitoring and data analysis to plan, schedule, or trigger maintenance activities. These activities are performed proactively as a way to prevent malfunction or failure, minimize the downtime resulting from these events, and extend the life span of your equipment.

Reactive maintenance challenges

How can preventive maintenance help?

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.

Despite their short-term benefits, purely reactive maintenance programs are actually costly, inefficient, and potentially even hazardous. By contrast, preventive maintenance strategies are proven to:
• Eliminate work stoppage and lost productivity caused by equipment downtime
• Reduce the frequency, cost, and labor hours dedicated to emergency repairs
• Improve maintenance operations and extend the life span of your assets

When you hold excess inventory, you risk tying up precious capital and reducing cash flow. Conversely, when you carry insufficient stock, you risk prolonging asset downtime and overpaying for emergency replacement parts.

Reactive, or corrective, maintenance differs from preventive maintenance in many key ways.

1. Managing spare parts inventory

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.

Malfunctioning equipment can cause work stoppages, disrupt project schedules, and demand task reassignment. One of the greatest disadvantages of reactive maintenance is that these events are hard to predict. This, in turn, makes it difficult to predict how and when your staffing outlook may be disrupted or when you may need to enlist the services of a third-party maintenance vendor. With reactive maintenance, you might not always be prepared to redistribute personnel and tasks to prevent lost productivity.

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.

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.

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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.

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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

Risk Management

Overcoming Reactive Maintenance Challenges

How reactive and preventative maintenance differ

3. Handling operational disruptions

4. Keeping the workplace safe

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.

Reliable CMMS software assists staff in developing, updating, and storing standardized maintenance procedures so your team is ready with a clearly delineated plan for minimizing downtime and keeping repair costs low when equipment fails.

How can preventive maintenance help?

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?

This usage-based maintenance strategy can serve as a backstop to prevent excess inventory or a critical shortfall of parts. With a preventive maintenance strategy, you can deploy features like automatic usage tracking, inventory holdings management, traceability, and real-time reporting to keep your spare-parts inventory database up to date.

These upfront costs aren’t always worth paying. Reactive maintenance might be your best option under the following conditions:
• The cost of routine maintenance tasks would be higher than the cost of replacement.
• The cost to maintain an aging piece of equipment would be greater than the cost of asset failure and replacement.
• Equipment is noncritical, and its failure wouldn’t affect productivity or create downtime.

Reactive maintenance is a form of physical asset management in which maintenance is only performed on equipment or machinery when it malfunctions or fails entirely. Sometimes referred to as run-to-failure maintenance or breakdown maintenance, reactive maintenance strategies provide the most basic level of asset maintenance and offer a minimum threshold of stability until your organization is prepared to take a preventive approach to maintenance.

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

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. Preventive maintenance strategies can help mitigate these challenges.

Published Feb. 15, 2024, by Limble.

How can preventive maintenance help?

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.

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

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.