If it ain’t broke, fix it.
As a manufacturer, you want your plant to run for the maximum number of hours. By putting a robust maintenance strategy in place, you’re making the whole operation more reliable and boosting uptime—the main goal of maintenance. The alternative: a failure that can shut down your plant and send maintenance costs through the roof.
There are four types of maintenance strategies.
- Run to failure. This can be costly and usually is not a desirable method unless used for a piece of equipment that is low cost, easily attainable, not production critical, and can be quickly replaced.
- Preventative maintenance. This is scheduled maintenance. In SAP we use maintenance plans to create preventative maintenance schedules on time, or performance-based maintenance.
- Predictive maintenance (PdM). This type of maintenance strategy is used with condition-based monitoring. In Sap, we can track meter readings for run time hours, as an example. Sensors can also be used on the equipment to send all readings directly to SAP, and in turn, generate a notification or work order to service the equipment well before it goes into failure.
- RCM, or Reliability Centered Maintenance, is the fourth maintenance strategy. This strategy is used by very competent, and highly mature companies. It is a strategy where every piece of equipment is analyzed for every possible failure mode. This takes the knowledge of very seasoned maintenance professionals and an extreme amount of accumulated data over time to produce a custom maintenance strategy for each piece of equipment.
Once you’ve decided on a maintenance strategy (or the combination of several strategies), use SAP to build a plan that outlines the steps to completing the maintenance tasks. The plan should list the work group that will perform each step, how long it will take to finish a particular task, and the order of priority.
Will preventative maintenance require a complete plant shutdown, or just a line shutdown? Can you perform it while your plant is still running? A maintenance plan will answer those questions. It’s also important to ensure that your plan generates work orders on a call horizon that will make your maintenance materials, and your inside and outside services and contractors, available when the job is due.
In transaction IP03 (or S/4 Hanna tile: Display Maintenance Plan) viewing the parameters of the maintenance plan will help you determine any changes that should be made.
For example, if your maintenance plan is on a monthly frequency, generate work orders at least a month before the job is due, to allow for proper scheduling and planning. Creating a schedule calls for job scoping: walking the line to determine the necessary steps, along with the materials and inside and outside labor required.
With job scoping complete, start the planning process. As part of the schedule, make sure that materials for production-critical machinery are in stock. You also need to build in lead time to receive parts for non-production-critical equipment and high-priced maintenance repair and operations (MRO) materials. With SAP’s Materials Requirement Planning (MRP), you can understand lead times, order parts and reserve materials already onsite.
Documentation is vital to preventative maintenance. Keeping a record of maintenance activities yields reliability metrics—and lets you foresee equipment problems before something goes wrong. In other words, preventive maintenance leads to predictive maintenance. For example, by using SAP S/4HANA to track of equipment temperature and vibration, your reliability team can create a plan to make fixes or adjustments that could avoid a breakdown.
Good key performance indicators (KPIs) are another key piece of your preventative maintenance process. KPIs show where you are today and where you need to go.
Besides maintenance metrics, a fully integrated ERP (SAP) gives you costing data. You’ll know how many hours it takes a mechanic to do a job, for instance, along with the price of materials. That gives you the full picture of what it costs to maintain a particular asset.
For example, a reliability engineer or maintenance professional can use SAP S/4HANA to pull up a six-month history for a machine (transaction MCI8). Observing that the same seal gets changed every month during preventative maintenance, and seeing the cost of materials and services, they might determine that the one recommended by the manufacturer isn’t working. The engineer can then use SAP’s Management of Change (MOC) application to replace it with a better seal, based on the prediction that doing so will drive down labor and materials costs.
In Part 2 of this series, we’ll take a closer look at how to use predictive maintenance in SAP to keep your plant running smoothly.
