Maintenance Planning and Control Tips for Your Industry

Maintenance is an essential step in the proper functioning of any industry. However, few entrepreneurs know the importance of good planning and maintenance control (PCM) in their plant. The lack of structure of this process greatly complicates the achievement of better results. With that in mind, we've broken down some tips for optimizing PCM for your industry.

But what is maintenance planning and control (PCM) anyway?

Although it is still linked to an operational routine, PCM is a more strategic part of the maintenance industry. After all, it is responsible for directing all the work, from planning to execution and quality analysis of all activities performed. In this planning, you must include important information that is not limited to maintenance processes, such as:

● The procedures and equipment necessary to comply with safety requirements during activities;

● The detailed record of maintenance plans;

● Detailing the resources needed to carry out the activities (this involves inputs, materials, spare parts, tools and labor).

Maintenance Planning:

In this first phase, the activity performed is based on the creation and management of maintenance plans, divided into the following categories:

● Predictive maintenance;

● Preventive maintenance;

Sensitive inspection (which aims to identify leakage failures, assembly, sources of waste, among other situations, through human work using the senses);

Definition of plans for routines such as lubrication, calibration, and improvements.

The plans mentioned above require different forms of programming, management, and execution. However, they all have one thing in common: they aim to ensure the availability and reliability of machinery and equipment in the industry.

Maintenance Control:

Maintenance control is related to the measurement and evaluation of everything that was performed in the programming and control steps. Thus, it is in this part that we define and implement metrics that will be used to validate and measure the effectiveness of the strategies developed in the PCM.

PCM Benefits:

When adopting maintenance planning and control, one of the main benefits of the practice is to ensure that maintenance is done properly, efficiently and accurately. In addition, another advantage that should be highlighted is the increased reliability and availability of your plant assets, especially as they are monitored for early failure.

Check out other advantages of PCM:

● Reduced need for emergency repairs and, consequently, unscheduled downtime;

● Increased productivity of maintenance teams;

● Improved working conditions and employee safety;

● Improved conservation of assets;

● The increased life cycle of equipment and spare parts (avoiding premature replacement).

How to do good maintenance planning and control:

Now the concept of PCM is clearer to you, we've put together five important tips for implementing and optimizing it in your industry. So be sure to read all our valuable tips!

Maintenance planning and control is a great alternative for optimizing investment.

1. Research well about maintenance:

In order to put in place efficient planning, it is essential to gather relevant information about machines and equipment, such as the main failures of the production process, among other things.

2. Create and analyze data:

When establishing the control of activities through work orders, it is time to analyze the data pointed out by technicians during maintenance and convert them into relevant information. After all, they will help you quantify all aspects recorded. From this analysis, it will be possible to better understand the situation of the sector and what is needed to implement the most appropriate planning for the reality and needs of the company.

3. Develop preventive and predictive maintenance plans:

The elaboration of plans is one of the main responsible for making PCM effective. Regardless of the method and tool chose, there is some information that should be recorded:

Schedule: The first step is to set the schedules for performing preventive and predictive maintenance. In addition, employees should be made aware of the importance of executing this schedule. After all, when a shutdown occurs without being scheduled, it compromises productivity in the company and raises costs;

Service instruction for maintenance: After defining the issues related to the schedule and downtime, the procedures that will be performed by the maintenance team should be recorded, detailing items such as inspection routines; exchange of parts; oil change and lubrication; machine cleaning and resource planning.

4. Track Results:

Do not think that the task ends after the implementation of the PCM model. In addition to making it work, it is essential to track performance and check for future improvements. After all, without measuring impacts (whether positive or negative) it is difficult to maintain efficient planning.

5. Create a continuous improvement routine.

Finally, the last tip is complementary to the previous one: develop constantly. There is no perfect plan, this means that your planning must be constantly adapted and refined.

As you can see, maintenance planning and control are critical to ensuring a good machine availability index, making staff more productive while optimizing production line routines.