According to ABB’s July 2023 Value of Reliability survey, which gathered responses from 3,214 plant maintenance decision makers globally, the cost to typical U.S. businesses for unplanned outages is $103,000 US per HOUR. In Canada, that number is $242,000 CDN per hour. Considering 68% of industrial businesses experience unplanned outages at least once per month, it’s surprising to hear that 22% of U.S. and 19% of Canadian businesses surveyed still use a run-to-failure maintenance strategy.
These survey results showcase how important equipment reliability and maintenance are for any industrial company. In light of these statistics, there are two questions to consider: “What maintenance strategy are we using?” and “Is this the right approach for our facility”?
Maintenance Strategies
In any organization with industrial machinery (either fixed or mobile), routine inspection and repair is a key element of your maintenance strategy. However, depending on the maintenance strategy chosen, this can significantly impact on equipment uptime and your bottom line. When determining the best possible maintenance strategy to use for your facility, many factors should be considered. For example, you need to look at asset criticality, ease of maintenance, available spare parts, and other aspects of your maintenance protocols. Let’s take a look at three maintenance strategies: Reactive, Preventive, and Predictive.
Reactive Maintenance Strategy (RM)
A reactive maintenance strategy (also known as “run-to-failure”), focuses on repairing or replacing assets once they have failed. Upon failure, the asset brought back to safe operational condition.
Generally, this strategy is implemented when anticipating and preventing failure for an asset is not always efficient or effective. This strategy may make sense if an asset is identified as having little or no impact on safety, production or reputation during a criticality analysis. These assets will typically have no maintenance conducted between failures unless a technician notices a need for it.
While this approach initially seems cost effective, the inconsistent nature of breakdowns makes it hard to plan. This often results in higher than expected labor costs, significant rush parts costs, and unanticipated production losses.
PROS
- Lower upfront costs
- Little to no planning required
- Less staff required
CONS
- Hard to manage budgets
- Shorter asset life (not running at optimal condition)
- Potential safety risks
- Higher repair costs (i.e. more severe issues)
- Higher parts costs (e.g. rush shipments)
- Ineffective use of labor
- Increased overall costs due to unplanned downtime
Preventive Maintenance Strategy (PM)
Preventive maintenance (also known as time-based maintenance strategy) is work that performed on a piece of equipment based upon a pre-determined schedule to lessen the likelihood of it failing. With this proactive approach, unexpected breakdowns are avoided as work is performed while the equipment is still in working condition. Work includes cleaning, lubrication, oil changes, adjustments, repairs, inspecting and replacing parts, and partial or complete overhauls that are regularly scheduled based on time or usage triggers.
This method has an 80/20 planned maintenance ratio: 80% of maintenance initiatives should be planned while the remaining 20% can be unexpected repairs. A preventive maintenance strategy requires a significant time investment to schedule, prepare and delegate tasks, however, the efforts are more cost-effective than a run-to-failure strategy.
PROS
- Reduces unplanned downtime
- Cost effective compared to RM
- Maximizes productivity
- Saves energy and resources
- Improved reliability
- Increases asset life
- Flexible as it allows for adjustment of maintenance periods
CONS
- Doesn’t consider asset condition – you could be doing maintenance when it’s not needed
- Significant investment in time/resources (e.g. labor)
- May result in maintenance occurring when not necessary (catastrophic failures can still happen)
Predictive Maintenance strategy
Predictive maintenance (also known as condition-based maintenance) uses condition-monitoring tools to track the condition of assets during operation. Like preventive maintenance, this is a proactive approach to maintenance. Asset failure is prevented through ongoing defect detection and operating condition adjustments. This method allows the maintenance frequency to be as low as possible to prevent reactive maintenance, without incurring the costs of preventive maintenance. The predictability and asset visibility seen with this approach ensures equipment is only shut down before an unavoidable failure. This increases an asset’s life cycle, reduces maintenance costs and increases asset availability.
PROS
- Full visibility of assets
- Cost effective over long term
- Predict asset failure using data versus time
- Increase component life, decrease downtime
- Reduced costs for parts and labor
- Improved safety
CONS
- Requires investment in condition monitoring technologies and tools such as oil analysis, thermography, vibration analysis
- Highly skilled staff needed for data interpretation
Choosing the Right Strategy
There’s no one correct approach to maintenance for everyone. It should be a balance of the various techniques based upon asset criticality and ease of maintenance at your facility.
Contact our team of reliability specialists and learn how we can help you to implement or optimize your current maintenance program.
