Why Industrial Maintenance is a Plant-Wide Problem

You can have the best industrial maintenance crew money can buy, but unless every one of your employees is aware of the importance of this aspect of plant management, any systematic operation is going to run into problems. Machinery and technology has come a long way in a very short amount of time, relatively speaking. But even the best examples of this machinery will break down unless it is maintained, cleaned, and tested on a regular basis. While a program should be in place to do just this, the plant also needs to foster an environment where taking care of the machinery is just as important as putting it to use.

Expecting Failure

Sometimes a piece of technology simply fails, giving not the slightest warning in advance of the failure. More often than not, though, there will be warning signs. The industrial maintenance crew needs to be aware of these warning signs so they can go in and find the problem before failure occurs. Fixing a piece of machinery before total failure occurs is often much quicker and much cheaper than fixing it after the fact. For this reason, employees should be told to report any strange happenings. More importantly, supervisors need to be told to pass these complaints up the chain or directly to the crew, making sure that the machinery gets checked out. It needs to be an understood concept that industrial maintenance is as important as getting the product out.

Working In Tandem

For obvious reasons, the industrial maintenance department and the operations crew are often at odds with one another, even when working towards the same general purposes. The operations crew frowns at downtime, even when necessary. If you can afford to run a plant that takes care of the technology at night and runs operations during the day, so much the better. But most businesses don't have this luxury. They are either operating 24 hours a day or everyone goes home at 5. This means the two crews must find a way to work together in harmony.

Inventory

It's important for the crew to have what they need on hand (or within driving distance) when a piece of machinery goes down. But that doesn't mean having half of your budget tied up in supplies. Find out the minimum you can get away with stocking, make relationships with local suppliers, and save money by keeping only what you need. Weigh the cost effectiveness of keeping excess inventory when compared with having an integral piece of technology go down for a couple of days. Make your inventory decision based on hard numbers.