Planned maintenance (PM) is critical for equipment to function as per its design criteria. Not only will planned maintenance regimes reduce the likelihood of failure, but when it is applied correctly, at the right frequency, this maintenance can significantly reduce OPEX expenditure. 

As consultants, we often see generic planned maintenance strategies that are not fit for purpose, being applied across asset equipment. This results in inefficient and ineffective maintenance being executed, which wastes time, money and can also induce failure.

Although generic maintenance is sufficient for less critical and less complex equipment such as lighting, asset stakeholders must invest time into the development of localized planned maintenance strategies for critical equipment, with complex failure modes and operating demands.

At Add Energy, we frequently analyze our clients' planned maintenance regimes to identify opportunities for rationalization and optimization. Results from these studies range from man-hour savings through reduction in frequencies, to cost reduction through optimized packaging, nesting and routing of maintenance work orders. 

In this blog post, we share some of our top tips for optimizing your planned maintenance regime...

Ensure accuracy of your equipment criticality 

Criticality of equipment will help the maintenance team to determine optimal frequencies of maintenance work orders as well as prioritize maintenance.

A review of equipment criticality should be completed before embarking on a planned maintenance optimization (PMO) project. This should involve the discipline engineers from the maintenance team on site, who know the behaviors and characteristics of the equipment in order to obtain optimal results. 

Improve the functional hierarchy of your asset register  

A structured and logical equipment hierarchy is essential for navigating through mass amounts of data in order to develop an optimized maintenance plan.

Understanding the interdependencies of equipment will enable the maintenance planners to identify requirements for isolation, and will help to package and route maintenance work orders that could be grouped by location to optimize resource utilization and time. 

This can be achieved through a desktop review of the engineering drawings and plot plans. 

Enhance the granularity of your equipment classification

Classifying your equipment by 'equipment type' will unlock significant benefits for your team. An example of this includes improving the granularity of your asset register by determining the type of equipment each tag refers to. For example, instead of defining all types of pumps as “PUMP”, you can differentiate equipment by the type of pump the tag is, such as a centrifugal pump (PUCE).

This enables reliability and cost analysis to be completed at a more detailed level, which, in turn, provides more value from the results. 

Our consultants advise utilizing the ISO 14224 standard for equipment classification. 

Conduct FMECA on the asset's top 10 most critical equipment 

In selecting the top 10 critical equipment types on your asset, results will not only be more impactful, but they will be realized much sooner. This is especially beneficial if you are operating with a lean, busy team who don’t have the luxury of stepping back to analyze equipment and apply theory. 

Localized maintenance strategies can then be developed based on the failure modes of the equipment actually installed on your asset, providing your equipment with an effective maintenance regime designed to mitigate failures and assure reliability. 

Allocate sufficient time to analyze your aging PM KPIs

Determining KPIs relating to your planned maintenance is key to unlocking efficiencies within your team. For example, in understanding which planned maintenance equipment types are contributing to your PM backlog, Maintenance Managers can use these insights to make decisions around resources, risk mitigation requirements and maintenance expenditure. 

Without visibility of PM KPIs, Maintenance Managers will struggle to see the wood for the trees and continue to firefight equipment failures rather than develop a planned maintenance regime that is based on criticality, risk and ROI. 

Conclusion 

To gain the most ROI from your PM regime, Maintenance Managers should consider the opportunities discussed above to unlock efficiencies and optimize what you have already got. 

To help maintenance teams identify these opportunities, Add Energy has developed a maintenance and performance benchmarking tool, M-C™, which interrogates clients' planned maintenance and CMMS data, benchmarks it against our own library of best practice maintenance and taps into our subject matter expert experience to develop a detailed roadmap to rationalize and optimize maintenance work orders.