Maintenance Management is often seen more as a series of required tasks than as an essential part of any industrial process. Some companies even reduce maintenance management to a “necessary evil” or to mere and unavoidable production costs.
In contrast, high-performing companies view maintenance management as an integral part of their business strategy, given its direct impact on productivity and profitability goals.
Properly valuing maintenance management requires cultural change across an entire organization. In addition to changing a maintenance management-averse mentality, companies wishing to grow their businesses must invest in the appropriate tools and solutions.
In this post, we’ll discuss how to develop a coherent maintenance management strategy and what your company stands to gain from doing so.
Planning and Scheduling are essential activities in production processes for every company and industry.
If companies wish to gain from a streamlined production and value chain, why should it be any different when it comes to Industrial Maintenance processes?
In an ideal world, the person responsible for planning and scheduling maintenance would do so preventively instead of correctively, but this is far from the norm. It’s more common to find companies that live under a “culture of repair” that is inefficient, unsustainable, and erodes profit margins.
Getting rid of this common repair culture can be challenging, given that it requires sincere and end-to-end cultural change. Nonetheless, the rewards in productivity and asset performance are well worth the struggle for developing a culture that values, supports, and practices preventive maintenance.
In most companies, developing and executing maintenance plans are the responsibility of one worker, while strategic information and data analysis are the responsibility of another.
However strange, in most companies, these individuals hardly ever communicate. Even if they do, they likely work at different times and even in different places. This poses a high risk of losing critical information. Even more so, when the data is available but not transmitted in real time, it can cause a very costly delay between data collection and shared access.
This means that to solve problems, manage production costs, and ensure proper asset maintenance practices, information needs to be immediately available to everyone.
Have you ever paused to think about the process that a maintenance technician follows to report an issue with a certain piece of equipment?
- The traditional process is manual, time-consuming, and even bureaucratic. This is because most of the equipment and other assets are far away from the office or even a computer terminal.
- Even when there are computers, there are often much more equipment and parts than computers. As a result, issues take a long time to report and solve due to late access to the company’s ERP system.
- Finally, even when there is timely access to the ERP, the beginning of the reporting process is still manual and paper-based. This slows down the reporting time and leaves room for human error.
As a response to this problem, there are ERP-integrated mobile solutions that allow operators and technicians to manage maintenance tasks in real time and streamline the issue resolution process.
Reducing planning times while maintaining reliability has been a significant challenge. Sigga’s Planning & Scheduling is a web-based solution fully integrated with SAP PM that was created to directly address this challenge.
Instead of having to manually sift through SAP transactions and spreadsheets, workers can see and manage all key data in a single interface.
The drag-and-drop feature allows planners/schedulers to quickly assign work and maintenance orders through a proprietary scheduling algorithm that identifies high-value tasks and can automatically create the optimal schedule for executing them.
In other words, Sigga’s Planning & Scheduling solution can significantly increase your productivity by streamlining your enterprise equipment maintenance tasks and routines.
Wrench time is commonly defined as one of the most important KPIs for productivity in maintenance. Expressed as a percentage, it’s the amount, from the total available time, that maintenance staff is engaged in productive tasks.
Generally accepted market and industry statistics indicate that an average worker’s productive time is only 25 to 35%. This is due to workers engaging in necessary but non-productive tasks such as include commuting to/from work, scheduled pauses (breaks), delays, etc.
It’s possible to improve this measure and increase productivity. Sigga Solutions have already helped customers increase the average wrench time to 45 – 50%. We’ve even had recent reports of increased productivity in ranges >60% and the possibility of an 80% production increase.
No matter which industry you operate in, building a maintenance management strategy is a challenge. To overcome this challenge, companies should invest in processes and technology that help deliver value-added maintenance practices.
Such technologies will allow your Planning Team to significantly reduce time spent on manual tasks while focusing on more important maintenance activities such as monitoring plant performance, developing new processes and methodologies, and analyzing results with reliable data.
Solutions, such as Sigga Planning & Scheduling, make it possible to minimize the time for repetitive tasks, such as filling out spreadsheets and freeing professionals to think and act strategically.
This approach allows planning and scheduling team leaders to focus on value-added management activities such as:
- Measuring and understanding the teams’ needs
- Managing labor headcount
- Optimizing plant resource allocation
- Reducing asset downtime
- Implementing multiple productivity tools simultaneously
When practicing value-added maintenance, planners can focus on making strategic and relevant business decisions instead of reacting to the common issues and ‘putting out fires’ that are part of every operation.
Yes.
Pairing a maintenance Planning and Scheduling solution with a culture of preventive maintenance delivers exceptional business results.
This pairing allows companies to develop strategic, long-term maintenance plans by analyzing entire project schedules, adjusting, predicting possible delays, and managing incidents.
These plans allow companies to be more efficient and competitive in the market, helping decision-makers better estimate and forecast costs, revenue, and financial returns.
Visit our Planning & Scheduling page for more information on how we can help streamline your industrial maintenance processes.
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Sigga‘s 20+ years of experience in SAP integration, asset management, and industrial maintenance solutions can efficiently guide you and your company through the process. You can partner with a company trusted by global industry giants such as ABInbev, Bunge, Petrobras, and Saint-Gobain.
Sigga’s solutions allow you to optimize your data flow, execute maintenance routines, eliminate unproductive tasks and excessive unnecessary shifts, and reduce paper usage to zero.
Using Sigga’s EAM Product Suite greatly facilitates executing your asset management strategy objectives as well as reaching your asset performance and productivity goals.
Enable your company’s digital transformation.