Prepare your maintenance plan: 10 essentials

When it comes to an industrial site, a real estate group, a health establishment or a school, monitoring the proper functioning of its equipment is essential to maintain a constantly productive organisation.

It is therefore crucial to prepare a maintenance plan to identify the various actions to be taken in order to optimise the maintenance of your installations and the production line. To better prepare this maintenance plan and the services provided within your organisation, here is a summary of the actions to be carried out by your maintenance department.

Preparing the maintenance plan

This plan includes various qualitative and quantitative data that will allow you to observe the evolution of your industrial assets in a precise manner. You will have to comply with the standards imposed on the use of your machines, and schedule periodic checks on certain parts to verify their condition.

Here are the 4 types of information that must be included: (Your first 4 essentials!):

• Information on the person involved, such as surname, first name, training, qualifications, function, date of the intervention and company (if external to the organisation), as well as his personal contact details,
• Information about the equipment. This includes the history of the equipment/facility used, (such as the number of hours it has been in operation daily/monthly) its failure rate and the parts most likely to be changed, its performance and the associated technical supplier documents,
• Technical information that includes the inventory of interventions, the objective of the maintenance plan and the control methods.,Information on the schedule to be followed.

In order to prepare this plan as well as possible, the scope of the work must first be established. To do so, you must take into account the various regulatory provisions.You should also follow the recommendations provided by the machine manufacturers and the analysis of material ageing using feedback from users, and various past interventions.

This step will give you an initial overview of the general condition of the equipment in your establishment.

Once this has been done, you should note the condition of each piece of equipment by assigning it a maintenance level. In general, there are three types of maintenance:

- Systematic maintenance. Maintenance operations by the technical team are scheduled periodically to intervene on the machine to recalibrate it or replace a part. This is based on a prior maintenance plan.

- Conditional maintenance. This consists of 'simple' monitoring of the equipment and if certain parameters become critical then it will lead to a maintenance action.

- Predictive maintenance. This makes it possible to define for each piece of equipment the maintenance operations that apply, the monitoring parameters, the reference values and alarm thresholds, the monitoring or replacement periodicity, the types of personnel and the material resources to be used.

The chronology of a maintenance plan

In order to draw up the most effective preventive maintenance plan possible, a certain chronology must be respected. This will enable your teams to organise themselves and prepare a schedule when carrying out this plan.

Here are the 5 steps that you must absolutely follow (the following 5 essentials):

1. Define the preventive operations to be carried out. Firstly, the manufacturers' recommendations must be taken into account, then the equipment’s behavior after use and the regulatory constraints.

2. Define the systematic maintenance operations: The frequency should be determined according to each piece of equipment, define a technician assigned to these controls, and define an operating process to be respected.

3.   Define conditional and predictive maintenance operations: Establish the criticality parameters according to the category of equipment with its alert thresholds

4.   Draw up a preventive maintenance file containing all the information, action plans and interventions carried out.

5.   Determine the optimum workload.

A tool to facilitate these steps?

The installation of a CMMS tool makes it possible to perfectly apply your preventive maintenance plan and facilitate the management of your various equipment on a daily basis. It is essential not to forget this type of tool. Please note that there is a multitude of CMMS software. In order to choose the most suitable one for your company, here is a presentation of certain criteria that the software must meet:

• It must be easy to use so it does not disrupt the working environment of the teams and to make their activities more fluid.
• The format of the software must be modular and respond in the most efficient way possible to your constraints.
• Multilingual
• You can use it as a database that will allow you to find all the different types of information and resources enabling you to observe the evolution of your assets.
• Manage the follow-up of interventions from the issuing of the request to its closing.
• Offer performance analysis tools.

It has to facilitate communication within the teams and with service providers.

The collaborative aspect of certain tools allows all employees to update information and resources, thus enabling information to be passed on quicker. Your maintenance teams gain in reactivity and the implementation of the maintenance plan will be done directly by the tool used. Your company will therefore see its maintenance costs decrease while increasing the productivity of your teams.

You now have the different tools to carry out an optimal maintenance plan, but don't forget that your company's needs are constantly evolving and that each critical piece of information must be added to the CMMS software as it comes along in order to avoid long and tedious preparation work.

Do you have a question about the article or need more information? Contact hugo@urbest.io

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