کاهش هزینه های نگهداری و تعمیرات پیشگیرانه (PM) از طریق اتخاذ یک فرهنگ قابلیت اطمینان متمرکز فعال

The economic and political realities of the 1990s forced managers to reverse long-standing organizational cultures in order to reduce costs and energy expenditures in their organisations. For instance, these can be achieved, with respect to maintenance, by replacing a reactive repair-focused attitude by a proactive reliability-focused culture. Thereby far less (i) human effort is expended and (ii) energy would be wasted, both of which lead to increased profitability.

Within many large-scale plant-based industries, maintenance costs can account as much as 40% of the operational budget [1], and therefore improving maintenance effectiveness is a potential source for making financial savings. Today’s competitive environment requires that industries try to sustain full production capabilities, while minimizing capital investment. From the maintenance perspective, this involves maximizing equipment reliability (i.e. uptime) including prolonging the equipment’s life. Wise operation and careful maintenance should together deliver cost-effective production reliability: this should be the basis for shrewd management decision-making. Unfortunately many industries have been slow to implement preventure maintenance (PM) initiatives. For instance, in Nigeria: • ∼80% of maintenance costs are spent on facilities with a mean time between failures of 30 days or less, • 30–40% of PM costs are spent on assets with negligible failure track-records, i.e. incorrect priorities are chosen and implemented. Overall, the goal for an organization is to increase profitability. The maintenance and asset-management functions can increase profits in two main ways, i.e. by decreasing running costs and increasing capability. If the annual maintenance cost exceeds 5% of the asset value, the organization is probably in financial difficulties. The total maintenance cost depends on the quality of the equipment, the way it is used, the maintenance policy and the business strategy. The wise business owner buys equipment that will subsequently need little maintenance, i.e. is highly unlikely to fail [2]. By automatically monitoring multi-functional printers (displaying the behaviour parameters of the components being assessed), eMaintenance programs can continually track the performance of each component. eMaintenance can provide a customised solution and implement the corresponding preventive process, which can be tailored to satisfy the individual needs, by providing highly-accurate ‘prior’ information, as and when required, about the performance (and degradation) of each component. With this information, maintenance costs can be reduced, and the production process becomes more effective.

Organisations with a wise maintenance-culture usually incur relatively low running costs with respect to the end-product costs. However, this culture rarely exits is Nigeria, where industries tend to be reactive (i.e. fire fighting when failures arise), as well as employing fixed-time maintenance replacements (or overhauls of components) schedules. The latter approach is seldom justifiable, because less than 15% of all components usually need replacement at the prescribed times commonly chosen. A recommendation for Nigerian industries is to buy highly-dependable equipment that should cost relatively little to maintain. The benefits thereby gained from reliable long-lived plant extend well beyond just lower maintenance costs: for instance, smaller stocks of spare parts are needed and fewer (but probably more highly multi-skilled) operators and maintenance personnel required. These should be empowered and motivated to become even more competent. To this end, each industry should develop a wiser maintenance culture: this would require • the industry becoming a knowledge-sharing and learning organisation; • an understanding of the unambiguous objectives of TPM and RCM processes; and • a comprehensive and easily accessible data-base for continual improvement, benchmarking, evaluation and analysis of each system’s behaviour. Most large companies lose between 2% and 16% of annual turnover due to downtime. In general, human error and laziness are the causes of at least 20% of downtime costs. This can be improved significantly by only using properly trained personnel and by devising and using appropriate information-technology controlled processes, thereby providing better proactive servicing.