What Should I Maintain?

 

“What should we maintain?”

It might seem like a simple question at first, but it isn’t, especially if your organization has not had a formal maintenance program in the past. Or perhaps you have a maintenance program, but it is overwhelmed and really struggling to put out fires.

Management might say “we need to maintain all of it”, and they are not necessarily wrong, but how do you get there. There is no ‘one size fits all solution’ but here are some thoughts to consider:

What are our most critical pieces of equipment? Can we start with a focused effort to improve our maintenance processes for them? Getting some success and traction with a few items first allows you to learn new processes without getting overwhelmed, and the improved up-time and reliability improvements should free up more resources to expand the program over time.

We have so much equipment – it is impossible to conceive how we will be able to include them all in a formal preventive / predictive maintenance program. Well, the good news is, you shouldn’t need to maintain “all” of it, at least not from a PM / PdM standpoint. There will be equipment that you will choose to “run to failure” – and that is OK. You need to take a discerning look at all of the equipment and parse out those things that will not significantly benefit reliability, operational and maintenance costs, and / or up-time. If the list is still too big after that first pass, make another pass through and remove items from the list that are less critical to the operation. Once you reduce the list of equipment that you will focus on, implement an effective PM / PdM program and continue to adapt it over time to later include those things that might have been left out of the initial effort.

Sometimes assistance from an outside perspective can help clarify this sorting process. Reach out for help if you need.