Three essential elements to ensure successful maintenance for chemical manufacturer

Manufacturing downtime cost is an important issue. For example, chemical manufacturer operating in bulk usually have more frequent opportunities to carry out preventive maintenance procedures, which can provide greater flexibility for maintenance planning and manual scheduling than continuous operation facilities. Regardless of product segmentation or operation process, comprehensive asset intelligence, effective preventive maintenance (PM) and efficient labor scheduling are the three basic elements to ensure the success of chemical maintenance.

1. Comprehensive intellectual assets.

Understanding the history of the equipment and being able to obtain this information immediately is an important part of an effective preventive maintenance program.

Consider a polymer process. If the agitator of the reactor drops, the polymer will solidify in the reactor in about one hour. When the polymer hardens, it takes two to four days to clean up the reactor. In addition to cleaning and maintenance costs, all this wasted time can lead to the accumulation of production losses. If the previous work order history is not easy to obtain, the maintenance technician is unlikely to check in time, so as to quickly repair the mixer.

However, through a comprehensive computerized maintenance management system (CMMS), such as the maintenance connection of the accrual company, technicians can quickly view the whole work order history of the agitator, so as to solve the problem and put the agitator back into service faster. Through the maintenance connection, technicians can also easily obtain maintenance and operation documents, procedures, instructions and drawings to help improve the maintenance time.

2. Effective preventive maintenance procedures.

In the past, maintenance work was usually passive. Generally, reactive maintenance plans established manually often lack consideration of resource capacity and availability. So, if there is one, these schedules can only be loosely followed. However, the arc advisory group released a preventive maintenance plan in December 2017 to assess the availability of skills and components and to conduct optimization analysis based on the past, present and future trends of EAM and CMMS. From the perspective of maintenance management, having a large amount of asset intelligence information provides an opportunity to identify trends and transfer maintenance tasks from passive, unplanned downtime events to active preventive maintenance. For example, looking at the collective work instruction history of a specific motor, it is obvious that the motor will fail after 5000 hours of use. With these data, the preventive maintenance software of maintenance connection can deliver the scheduled PM work order according to the equipment usage.

Why is this shift to preventive maintenance significant? In November 2017, Aberdeen group pointed out in its latest report asset performance management: pioneering a better way for operation excellence that manufacturing companies lose $50 billion annually due to unplanned downtime. When unscheduled downtime occurs in the chemical manufacturer's non working hours, the labor cost increases, because overtime, accelerated materials and equipment need to be repaired, and the production loss time is quite long.

When the equipment maintenance task is planned and the parts are available, manual scheduling makes the maintenance execution more effective. Production downtime can also be predicted - which means that operations can potentially build product inventory levels in a way that customers still ship and production revenue loss does not occur.

3. Effective labor scheduling.

One of the key challenges facing the maintenance management of chemical manufacturer is to reduce the number of personnel to maintain aging facilities. It is vital that labor is arranged in a way that maximizes efficiency and drives labor productivity.

Using the asset work history in the maintenance link can help managers improve the accuracy of estimating the repair time to repair the equipment. This accuracy can also help the labor planning process.

By providing maintenance managers and dispatchers, maintenance connection's planning and scheduling CMMS software ultimately helps drive efficient labor scheduling

Visibility of personnel assignments.

Flexible view to view assignments in different ways (such as calendar view).

The ability to assign tasks automatically.

Generate PM work order according to various triggers.

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