Equipment maintenance refers to the routine activities and procedures that are carried out to ensure the proper functioning, safety, and longevity of machinery, tools, vehicles, or any other type of equipment used in various industries and settings. Proper maintenance is essential for preventing breakdowns, reducing downtime, extending the lifespan of equipment, and ensuring the safety of operators and the surrounding environment.

Some key aspects of equipment maintenance:

Preventive Maintenance:  This involves scheduled inspections, cleaning, lubrication, and minor repairs to prevent equipment from failing or deteriorating. It helps to identify and address potential concerns before they become serious issues.

Corrective Maintenance: When equipment breaks down or malfunctions, corrective maintenance is performed to restore it to working condition. This can involve troubleshooting, repairing, or replacing faulty components.

Predictive Maintenance: Utilizing data and technology, predictive maintenance uses sensors and monitoring systems to predict when equipment is likely to fail or require maintenance. This helps organizations plan maintenance activities more efficiently.

Scheduled Inspections: Regular inspections of equipment help identify wear and tear, damaged parts, or other issues that may not be obvious during day-to-day operations.

Safety Checks: Ensuring that safety features on equipment are functioning correctly is critical to protect operators and prevent accidents.

Documentation: Keeping detailed records of maintenance activities, including dates, performed tasks, and any issues identified, helps in tracking the history of equipment and planning future maintenance.

Let’s see how one can easily manage the maintenance of their equipment to achieve higher operational efficiency.

Maintenance

Go to the Maintenance module where we can find Maintenance teams in the dashboard.

On selecting a maintenance team, we can view and edit details related to the maintenance requests associated with the maintenance team.

On creating a new maintenance request, we can specify the equipment that is subject to maintenance, the category to which the equipment belongs, the date when the request is made, the type of maintenance namely, corrective maintenance or preventive maintenance, the maintenance team and the person who is responsible for conducting the maintenance, the time and the duration.

Machines & Tools

Complete list of Equipment for maintenance can be viewed by going to the Machines & Tools option in the Equipment menu.

In the Equipments form, enter the details such as the category of equipment, the person who handles the equipment, the maintenance team and/or the technician responsible for the maintenance of the equipment, the location, and the work center for its maintenance. In the maintenance tab of the equipment form, specify the frequency of maintenance, duration, expected mean time between failures, estimated next failure, mean time to repair, and so on.

Work Centers

To allocate a work center for the maintenance of each equipment, select the Work Centers option in the Equipment menu.

The Work Center page provides details related to the maintenance of every equipment that is done in that work center such as the capacity of the work center, the hourly cost of operation, efficiency, Overall Equipment Efficiency target to be achieved, working hours, alternative work center, analytic account associated with the maintenance in that work center, the setup time and cleanup time of that work center.

One can even directly schedule a maintenance request by going to the Maintenance Calender option of the Maintenance menu.

We can add different categories of Equipment to group them by their functionality. For that, go to the Configuration menu to select Equipment Categories and create a new equipment category to add the equipment belonging to that category. We can see in the below image that there are 4 equipment and 5 maintenance requests in that equipment category.