“Prevention is better than cure”

Maintenance is the act of preserving or retaining an object so that it performs its function without disruption. It can be classified into 2 types:

• Corrective Maintenance – In this type of maintenance, action is taken after the occurrence of the failure.
• Preventive Maintenance – In this type of maintenance, actions are taken prior the occurrence of failure.

WHAT IS PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE?

Before getting into the details, let’s look at an example. Imagine yourself in a situation in which you must spend money on changing the oil of your car. That might not seem as a big issue as it wouldn’t cost that much. But what if someone says you must spend money on repairing the seized engine of your car. That is not a situation anyone would like to be in.
Preventive Maintenance or PM can be easily understood from the above example. It is the process of avoiding failure, by taking corrective measures at regular intervals so that the equipment works without failure. It is designed to retain equipment reliability by replacing worn components before they fail.

WHY DO WE NEED PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE?

Whether it’s a small scale, medium scale or large-scale industry, production speed and production cost play a very important role. It is necessary to fulfill the customer’s requirements and produce adequate number of products. If a machine stops working suddenly or if any sort of failure occurs during production, the entire supply chain is affected adversely, and the production cost increases. Some stats show that 82% manufacturers face unplanned downtime and 5% of productivity is lost due to downtime of equipment.
To avoid all this, industries use of smart technologies like CMMS [ Computerized Maintenance Management System ] software. It helps them schedule maintenance activities without any hassle and helps in analyzing the failure reasons by making the use of past data. This results in longer running life of equipment, un-interrupted production and increase in production efficiency.

DO WE REALLY NEED A CMMS SOFTWARE?

Yes, without a shadow of a doubt. In today’s world, we are witnessing industrial automation and new emerging technologies. This has resulted into much more competition among the peers and more variety of options for any product for the customer. Product quality is also considered a top priority. To satisfy all these, one must have robust production capabilities in which you provide right quality in right quantity at right time. It is only possible if your machines are in a reliable state of working. CMMS software plays a very important role in matching the above needs. It comes with plethora of features which is much more difficult to handle individually or by some other means. You can create work orders with proper instructions, schedule equipment maintenance, evaluate reason for failures and have control of all the spare parts in one place. Every machine has a working life, after which it needs to be replaced or shut down. But ideally, that life is somewhat hard to attain without the proper maintenance of the machine.

“The Million Mile Tundra”

There was a famous story about a Toyota pickup in news recently. It was called the “The Million Mile Tundra”. A person named Victor Sheppard bought a Toyota Tundra in 2007 which crossed the 1 million mark on the odometer, which is roughly around 1609344 kilometers. The company gave the owner a new 2016 Toyota Tundra and bought the old one to see what makes it so different.  They noticed there was very less amount of carbon deposits and almost every component was same as factory assembled. The engineers were surprised to see that how a truck which was fairly used can be in such a good condition by timely oil change, proper service and small tune ups. So, in conclusion, it can be understood how important role maintenance play for proper working of the equipment. CMMS software has more than anyone would ever need to cover their maintenance needs. Whether your plant have 10 or 100 equipment, you can manage everything and take decisions very easily.

– By Sharad Mishra