Jon
August 24th, 2004, 12:54 AM
I am interested to hear people’s opinions and experiences regarding how the Maintenance Function is viewed – from both the ‘shop-floor’ and the management perspective - within the context of your own manufacturing/processing environment?
Particularly, what are the everyday pressures experienced by Maintenance Teams that are exerted upon them by production and operations departments? What exactly is it that the maintenance function expected to achieve within your organisation?
For example: is the role of maintenance within your organisation expected to constantly achieve high levels of reliability in order to reduce plant downtime and increase production capacity?
Or is it the reality that maintenance is completely polarised around performing a routine maintenance program and responding to machinery breakdowns as effectively as resources allow?
In theory, it’s very easy to appreciate the benefits of predictive maintenance techniques such as condition monitoring to ‘catch’ faults to prevent breakdowns, and ‘lean’ reliability approaches to increase maintenance cost-efficiency.
However, in everyday practice, what are the real-world, practical barriers that maintenance managers and engineers face when it comes to considering implementing reliability improvements, and particularly, condition monitoring?
In actuality, is condition monitoring seen as providing useful information to enable engineers to improve and target their maintenance activities?
Or is CM perceived as an extra ‘hassle’ on top of more necessary, daily maintenance responsibilities that are faced by the guys in charge of getting-the-job-done?
I think it could be very interesting to share a few views on this – particularly to see if there is any contrast between experiences from different industry sectors.
Appreciate people's opinions.
Regards,
Jon
Particularly, what are the everyday pressures experienced by Maintenance Teams that are exerted upon them by production and operations departments? What exactly is it that the maintenance function expected to achieve within your organisation?
For example: is the role of maintenance within your organisation expected to constantly achieve high levels of reliability in order to reduce plant downtime and increase production capacity?
Or is it the reality that maintenance is completely polarised around performing a routine maintenance program and responding to machinery breakdowns as effectively as resources allow?
In theory, it’s very easy to appreciate the benefits of predictive maintenance techniques such as condition monitoring to ‘catch’ faults to prevent breakdowns, and ‘lean’ reliability approaches to increase maintenance cost-efficiency.
However, in everyday practice, what are the real-world, practical barriers that maintenance managers and engineers face when it comes to considering implementing reliability improvements, and particularly, condition monitoring?
In actuality, is condition monitoring seen as providing useful information to enable engineers to improve and target their maintenance activities?
Or is CM perceived as an extra ‘hassle’ on top of more necessary, daily maintenance responsibilities that are faced by the guys in charge of getting-the-job-done?
I think it could be very interesting to share a few views on this – particularly to see if there is any contrast between experiences from different industry sectors.
Appreciate people's opinions.
Regards,
Jon