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What is Reliability-centered maintenance?

Reliability-centered maintenance is a maintenance strategy that optimizes the maintenance program of a facility. The final result of these types of programs is the implementation of a specific maintenance strategy on each of the assets of the facility. The maintenance strategies are optimized so that the productivity of the plant is maintained using cost-effective maintenance techniques.

An effective reliability-centered maintenance implementation examines the facility as a series of functional systems, each of which has inputs and outputs contributing to the success of the facility. It is the reliability, rather than the functionality, of these systems that are considered. The questions that need to be asked for each asset are:

1. What are the functions and desired performance standards of each asset?
2. How can each asset fail to fulfill its functions?
3. What are the failure modes for each functional failure?
4. What causes each of the failure modes?
5. What are the consequences of each failure?
6. What can and/or should be done to predict or prevent each failure?
7. What should be done if a suitable proactive task cannot be determined?

Hit your targets with Reliability Centered Maintenance

Reliability-centered maintenance identifies the functions of the company that are most critical and then seeks to optimize their associated maintenance strategies to minimize system failures and ultimately increase equipment reliability and availability. The most critical assets are those that are likely to fail often or have large consequences of failure.

Want to know more? Call MaintenX today!

What is Lean Maintenance?

During the past decade, the “lean” phenomenon has enabled manufacturing industries to greatly increase their levels of profitability and productivity.  Combined with other initiatives like Total Productive Maintenance, Lean Maintenance has encouraged companies to focus on production process efficiency.

Why Implement Lean Maintenance?

Many establishments have fallen into the trap of concentrating on the tools and techniques associated with Lean instead of the reason for their use. Lean Maintenance is a powerful approach to identifying and eliminating waste-related issues and delivering real bottom-line improvements, if it’s implemented and managed in the right way.

Integrated Lean Maintenance

The integrated Lean Maintenance improvement approach assertively recommends and applies Lean principles in an appropriate framework specifically adapted for their application to maintenance.

Benefits of Lean Maintenance

The benefits are:

• Full implementation of targeted Lean improvement projects over a 12 month period.
• Rapid achievement of measurable performance improvements.
• A Lean program that can be managed and monitored, which will ensure improvements are sustained over the long-term.
• Consistency of approach for future Lean improvement projects.
• Fully trained personnel in the principles of Lean maintenance.
• Site-wide exposure of Lean maintenance through demonstrating the benefits and not just the tools and techniques.  We find this is the best way to disseminate the approach through all the levels of an organization.

For more information on Lean Maintenance, call MaintenX today!

One-on-one mentoring relationships once only worked through face-to-face meetings. But mentoring is evolving thanks to a proliferation of communication tools and increasing social media activity. The future of mentoring is open and unstructured.

If your professional growth concerns aren’t met by a single mentor, have no fear: it’s perfectly acceptable and in many cases even expected for you to have more than one mentor. After all, those who can advise typically have specialized knowledge. If you need guidance in other disciplines, seek out other mentors to supplement your knowledge.

Benefits

• You are no longer limited by geography
• You can think outside your industry
• Your specific questions can be answered
• You can engage with or simply pose a question to a mentor on an ad hoc basis
• You can work with several mentors
• You can be both student and teacher
• Your mentor isn’t the only one giving in this scenario; you have insights to offer as well. Perhaps you can lend your voice to a new project they have in beta, or you can share insights on an advertising campaign as a member of a different culture or minority group.

Want to know more about how professional remote mentorship can help you? Call the maintenance experts at MaintenX today!

A reactive maintenance strategy is one that focuses on fixing equipment after it breaks down or fails. Reactive maintenance was the predominant strategy for many years, but as new software and technology tools became available, proactive approaches like preventive maintenance and predictive maintenance became more prevalent. Most maintenance programs today are some combination of reactive and proactive.

While the perfect ratio of reactive to proactive maintenance varies based on many factors, there are 5 primary consequences of reactive maintenance strategies that are compelling reasons for companies to continue to shift toward more proactive approaches:

• Reduced Safety
• High Unplanned Downtime
• Maintenance Labor Inefficiency
• Shortened Asset Life
• Increased Maintenance Costs

High Unplanned Downtime

One of the primary goals of manufacturing maintenance programs is to limit unplanned downtime. Preventive maintenance programs focus on regularly schedule maintenance based on calendar time or in-service utilization that prevents the downtime event. Reactive maintenance strategies allow downtime events to occur. As a result, manufacturers who use reactive strategies have a much higher frequency and longer durations of unplanned downtime than those who employ preventive or predictive maintenance approaches.

Maintenance Labor Inefficiency

One often overlooked consequence of a reactive maintenance strategy is its contribution to maintenance labor inefficiency. It is very difficult to plan work schedules when unknown maintenance events take priority. The maintenance planner/scheduler job can be extremely challenging when unplanned downtime events frequently interrupt scheduled work.

Want to know more? Call MaintenX today!

Summer is upon us! But that warm weather we’ve been waiting for all year also comes with substantial surges in our utility bills. Here are a couple tips to help you save on your energy bill.

Turn it Off

Turning your AC off while you’re sleeping can result in huge savings.

Programmable Thermostat

A programmable thermostat is a very energy-efficient tool that allows you to program what hours your home will be vacant and when you will be asleep. During those times, it will adjust the temperature of your home accordingly.

ENERGY STAR

The ENERGY STAR is an accolade given by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to a product that meets the rigorous energy-efficiency guidelines set forth by the U.S. government in order to reduce greenhouse emissions.

Insulation

Air leakage occurs when air from the outside enters and conditioned air leaves your house through cracks and openings. Although you may not notice it, this makes it harder and more expensive for you to ventilate your home. Reducing the flow of air leaking in and out of your home is a cost-effective way to cut the price of cooling and maximize the functionality of your air conditioning system.

Cleaning HVAC Unit

In order for an air conditioning unit to function efficiently, its filters, coils, and fins must be maintained regularly. Simply put, a clean air conditioner is an effective one. The most crucial piece of maintenance that will ensure the maximization of your air conditioner is routinely replacing or cleaning its filters.

Want to know more? Call MaintenX today!

Cleaning is a crucial part of food safety in a food service establishment. If your facility is not cleaned properly, customers could get sick, pests could enter and infest your establishment, and many more undesirable consequences will likely occur

Learning to manage cleaning tasks is a critical part of your duties as a food manager.

Cleaning Schedules

Cleaning schedules can help you and your employees know what needs to be cleaned and how often it should be cleaned. Some things, like food preparation utensils and surfaces, should be cleaned very often.

Surfaces

Any food-contact surface, such as a knife or cutting board, constantly used with time/temperature control for safety foods should be cleaned at least every four hours. Why the four hour rule?

Other Surfaces

Non-food-contact surfaces are surfaces that do not directly come into contact with food that will be prepared. Clean them often enough to keep soil and mold from accumulating.

In addition to the items mentioned above, make sure to clean:

• Floors
• Walls
• Ceilings
• light fixtures
• equipment
• other components of your restaurant

Doing a thorough walk-through will help you determine how often to clean these items.

Other Cleaning Tips

Regularly check to make sure that the cleaning is getting done correctly, and that your employees are fully trained on what is expected of them. See employees doing their cleaning duties and inspect their work afterward.

Food Safety Reminder

Clean and sanitize ice machines regularly to prevent the growth of harmful bacteria.

As a hospital facilities management professional, it can be easy to let budgetary concerns fall by the wayside in the name of efficiency. When something is broken or dirty, it must be cleaned or fixed.

Keep reading for key tips on finding cost savings and budgetary efficiency.

Look at the Bigger Picture

The facilities management budget for any organization cannot be looked at in a vacuum. Rather, your budget is directly related to the performance and needs of all the other departments at your facility.

Warranty Database

Facility equipment repair can be a huge cost for hospital facility management. While essential pieces of healthcare equipment cannot go unrepaired, it is important that your department keep track of what is currently under warranty. That way, any repairs or maintenance that are covered by a product warranty do not end up cutting into your budget. Before any repair or maintenance is ordered, check the warranty database and verify whether or not that equipment is covered.

Pricing Agreements with Vendors

Vendor pricing agreements can be a very effective way to maintain your facility’s efficiency without going over your budget. If you lay out what you expect and are willing to spend on repairs over the course of the life of a piece of equipment, and get that amount in writing, you will not be subject to unexpected charges when maintenance or repairs are required.

Environmental sustainability is having a moment. It’s hard to find an aisle at Home Depot or Target that isn’t packed with products that claim to have environmentally sound ingredients, energy-saving technology or more responsibility sourcing.

But beyond marketing, what’s the benefit to business owners of going green? Can a company improve its bottom line while helping to save the environment?

Money

The answer is yes. Better insulation, after all, translates into lower heating and cooling bills, and devices like energy-efficient lighting and low-flow toilets can slash utility expenditures.

Lighting

For many businesses, changing lighting is more complex than turning out the lights after work. Most offices are equipped with old-fashioned fluorescent lights, which are more energy-efficient than incandescent bulbs but less energy-efficient than LEDs. Old fluorescents tend to flicker, and often produce a cold, unpleasant light. In addition, their bulbs can be expensive and difficult to replace.

Sunshine

Another way to cut electrical bills is by taking advantage of a free, limitless lighting resource that’s available to most businesses: the sun. In addition to lowering lighting costs, sunlight also improves the feel of an office and the morale of workers. Daylight gives employees a connection to the changing weather and the patterns of the day and reinforces their circadian rhythms.

Facility managers know that budgets for owner-occupied buildings are tight, and commercial real estate can face economic strain even after a recovery is underway.

The tips below will help you cut energy costs.

Depending upon how your site lighting is operated and circuited, you can create an “economize mode” for overnight when the site is at its lowest occupancy.

Involve the Entire Community to Trim Energy Costs

Team up with our custodians, security officers, maintenance personnel and the staff and faculty to keep lights off, power usage down and waste down. Most custodians on night shift clean rooms in a sequence where they finish a room, turn off all equipment and then move to the next area. Security watches the buildings and makes sure all equipment is off after personnel leaves. This is a great way to ensure you cut costs effectively.

Turn Off Vending Machine Lights

Remove light bulbs from all vending machines as an energy-savings initiative. Each machine with the lighting removed was posted with a notice that the machine was in operating condition and the light bulbs had been removed to reduce electric energy consumption.

Use Process Improvement to Reduce Kitchen Energy Use

If you have a commercial kitchen in your facility, then it’s likely to be your most energy intensive operation. In fact it’s probably using five times more energy than any other area. Here are a few thoughts on cutting kitchen energy use.

When you’re appraising your elevator maintenance plan options, you might have a general idea of what you need. However, since elevators are very complicated pieces of equipment, there are certain things many people miss in the research phase. Unfortunately, this often results in an elevator owner locked into a long-term contract with an unreliable service provider.

Our checklist will help you.

Benefits

The right elevator maintenance contract will ensure that your elevators:

• Operate in accordance with applicable codes
• Pass required state inspections
• Keep your passengers safe
• Avoid costly repairs

Each elevator service company includes and excludes different services in their own versions of these maintenance plans.

Coverage

The coverage level will determine how much financial risk you are taking with your elevator — basically what you’re getting for your money.

Pricing

Cost will likely be one of your deciding factors when selecting a service provider, but it’s important to realize that the cheapest option isn’t always the most affordable in the long run.

Safety

There is no “one-size-fits-all” elevator maintenance checklist. The safety checks will be contingent on the specific type of elevator you have, so the operator will have an elevator maintenance checklist that is designed to the specifications of your equipment’s exact make and model. Some of the basics that a technician will assess include:

• Safety circuits
• Foot pound pressure on door closing
• Door protection
• Oil levels
• Ride comfort
• Leveling at landings

Ask your maintenance provider for a checklist of safety tests specific to your elevators that are guaranteed to be performed at every visit.