Maintenance Strategies Effectiveness in the industry

ABRAMAN – BRAZILIAN ASSOCIATION OF MAINTENANCE AND MANAGEMENT OF ASSETS – brings in its National Document a research that represents a sample of the National Industry.

An indicator that approximately 5% of the industry’s gross turnover is spent on maintenance.

The manufacturing industry is a diverse environment of factories and operating models that can have their competitiveness assessed in many ways.

There are industries that evaluate maintenance cost as a share of total production cost.

What is certain is that there is little data available for specific industrial segments, especially in Brazil, on what representativity factor would be appropriate for the percentage calculation of maintenance cost.

One imagines that each industry or industrial sector seeks the best strategy or combination of maintenance techniques that will generate what they consider the best results.

Because of their relevance, maintenance costs will be reflected in the financial result of an organization.

The three main items in this cost are labor, materials (spare parts), and subcontracted service costs.

In this text, two indicators to evaluate the effectiveness of the maintenance strategy will be addressed: maintenance cost as a function of the Asset Replacement Value (RAV) and the Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE).

MAINTENANCE COST AS A FUNCTION OF THE REPLACEMENT VALUE OF THE ASSET

There are international entities that evaluate the effectiveness of maintenance programs as a percentage of the replacement value of this asset, or RAV – Replacement of Asset Value.

Asset Replacement Value is a way to audit maintenance programs by establishing the representativeness of the annual maintenance cost in relation to the value of a complete asset replacement.

So maintenance becomes a fraction of the total cost of acquiring the asset.

The lower the rate, the greater the value the maintenance program generates for the organization.

The method for finding the RAV is defined by:

1. The sum of all maintenance costs related to an asset or set of assets over a year;
2. Multiply this number by 100;
3. Divide the result of the first and second item by the total replacement cost of the asset.

What rate is acceptable? The maintenance cost at 3% of the RAV, would leave the maintenance practices of this industry among the best in the world.

However, this is a question to be answered by each organization. What is certain is that the rate depends on the maintenance strategy applied.

If the industry in question is working with reactive corrective maintenance – fix it when it breaks – this rate can reach close to one fifth of the annual RAV according to the American The Maintenance Phoenix, and in the case of proactive maintenance – preventive and predictive – it can reach 1.4%.

Remind the reader that just as the cost of maintenance goes down, productivity and production quality go up with the implementation of a proactive maintenance plan.

Industries that adopt proactive maintenance, such as Reliability Centered Maintenance or RBM, for their most important assets will maximize the productivity of those assets over their useful life. But MCC does not happen by itself.

It is necessary for maintenance and machine operation teams to work together and use all the resources at their disposal to identify and repair potentially aggressive failures before they occur.

OEE – OVERALL EQUIPMENT EFFECTIVENESS

OEE is one of the fundamental components of TPM (Total Productive Maintenance) and is defined as the percentage of time that the industry (machinery or set of machinery) is able to produce at full capacity, products within the established specification.

Its perfect, utopian index would be 100% of the time. In other words, it measures the difference between the actual and potential performance of a production unit. Its formula is generally defined by:

OEE (%) = Availability (%) x Effective Performance (%) x Quality Index (%), where:

• Availability: the percentage of time that production actually took place;
• Effective performance: of the time it produced, how fast it produced the items;
• Quality: of the units produced, what was the percentage accepted for sale.

The OEE is an interesting indicator because availability losses can occur due to both operational and maintenance practices, and therefore encourages these two teams to work together. In addition to indicating how much loss has occurred, it indicates where it occurred.

OEE directs the focus to the loss of potential compared to the possible rate (100%).

It allows all improvement opportunities to be analyzed and those that can provide the best feedback to meet the production goals and consequently to satisfy the customer’s needs in at least product quality and delivery time.

Industries have an allocation of their total maintenance budget between corrective, preventive, and predictive.

What should be sought is to reduce reactive maintenance and work proactively with the anticipation of failures and breakdowns in order to improve the asset’s productivity and meet production targets.

If equipment to monitor the reliability of machines is not yet in common use, it is because factors such as cost, availability, ease of use, and difficulty of access to the monitored data get in the way.

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