Maintenance Activities - What You Need to Consider

What are Maintenance Activities?

Maintenance activities include all work that serves the care and maintenance of systems and machines. The aim is to ensure their operational safety, efficiency and service life. Important measures include corrective, preventive and predictive maintenance, which can minimize downtimes, reduce costs and optimize the safety and performance of operating equipment.

In the industrial environment, maintenance specifically serves to maintain the operational capability of plant and machinery. Ideally, maintenance activities should be part of an integrated maintenance strategy. In this way, companies can effectively reduce the risks associated with prolonged or major breakdowns.

Types of Maintenance

Companies take different approaches to maintenance. The following are the most common.

Corrective Maintenance

Measures to rectify faults are taken as soon as a failure or defect has occurred. Only the specific fault is responded to, which is why this is often referred to as “reactive maintenance”. 

This approach is initially associated with very low costs and is more frequently used for machines whose potential failure is not business-critical. At the same time, the costs of any repairs cannot be planned in advance and can be very high, depending on the type of defect. 

Preventive Maintenance

Maintenance activities are carried out at fixed intervals to ensure the functionality of the machine or system. This can include regular oil changes and the replacement of wearing parts or simply periodic cleaning. 

A variation of this approach is condition-based maintenance - here, measures are taken when there are concrete indications of possible failures or defects. This requires effective monitoring of the machine's condition, typically using a suitable machine data acquisition software and the associated sensors.

Predictive Maintenance

This form of predictive maintenance draws on data analyses from the process and enables predictions to be made about when maintenance work is necessary and important on which machines. 

Comprehensive process data makes it possible to plan maintenance intervals precisely and thus reduce necessary downtimes or stoppages to a minimum. The ongoing digitalization of production facilities is making this form of smart maintenance the approach of choice for more and more manufacturing companies today. 

Advantages of Maintenance Activities

A defective machine produces nothing - this statement is correct, but falls short. A closer look at the actual business risks associated with non-functioning systems underlines more clearly the benefits of intelligently planned maintenance activities. 

Reduction of Downtimes

The regular implementation of maintenance activities ensures that business-critical machines and systems can remain in continuous operation. Regular maintenance and inspections prevent costly breakdowns and downtime.

Increasing Productivity

The longer machines run without interruptions or faults, the higher their productivity and added value over their entire service life. Experience has shown that professional maintenance measures also reduce the time needed for repairs, so that machines and systems remain fully operational for longer. 

Optimizing the Service Life

Careful maintenance helps to minimize wear and tear on the systems. Signs of wear can usually be rectified at an early stage and with comparatively little effort. This makes a significant contribution to improving their service life and prevents the costly replacement of machines and systems.

Safety in Operation

The regular inspection of machines ensures that they function properly and that their operation does not pose a safety risk to employees, the environment or other stakeholders. In conjunction with clear recording / logging of all maintenance measures, companies also meet important legal regulations and other compliance requirements.

Maintenance - Four types of Activities

The ideal maintenance process is made up of the following measures - inspection, maintenance, repair and improvement. Each sub-area fulfills an important function in the overall complex:

Inspection

An inspection is a systematic check of systems and machines to assess their current condition and identify potential problems at an early stage. The aim is to effectively prevent unplanned breakdowns.

Such an inspection can consist of many components: Visual inspections can be used to identify obvious damage, functional tests are used to check that the machine is working correctly and (sensor) measurements provide information on important measured values such as pressure, vibration or temperature.

Maintenance

Maintenance comprises planned measures to care for and maintain the operational readiness of systems and machines. The aim here is to maintain their target condition for as long as possible.

This can include lubricating moving parts, replacing known wear parts or cleaning the system to remove dirt or deposits.  

Repair

A fault has occurred in the repair area that needs to be rectified. The original target condition of the machine or system is restored in this step - and as quickly as possible. 

Damaged or failed components are replaced, any defects in the machine are rectified and individual parts are repaired or replaced if necessary. 

Improvement

Improvement (or optimization) aims to optimize the current state of an operational system or machine. This should either increase its performance or reduce its probability of failure. 

This can be achieved, for example, by eliminating technical and mechanical weaknesses in the system, retrofitting more modern components or training your own personnel in suitable maintenance activities.

MES and Maintenance - Utilizing Valuable Synergies

A clearly elaborated concept for basic maintenance activities ensures that all necessary measures are carried out in a time-, process- and production-optimized manner. 

An MES (Manufacturing Execution System) provides additional support here - through the seamless integration and monitoring of production processes and maintenance measures. A complementary software solution offers these advantages, among others:

• Real-time monitoring of the status of systems and machines
• Linking of product and maintenance data for easy planning of maintenance work without interrupting operations
• Options for automated maintenance planning based on patterns and trends / evaluation of historical data and real-time data
• Simple logging of all maintenance activities
• Increased efficiency by reducing downtimes and targeted maintenance measures that can be ordered by the system.

By using MES software in production, companies can take full advantage of preventive and predictive maintenance methods. The availability of systems and machines is guaranteed and all maintenance measures are documented and communicated accordingly so that they can be taken into account in production planning. 

To this end, the individual tools and modules of the digital production control system exchange data and information in real time, creating a virtual image of the entire production process. This sustainably improves the planning, monitoring and control of complex production processes. 

Maintenance Activities - Best Practices for Implementation

What looks simple on paper is a complex process that is constantly evolving. To avoid avoidable mistakes during implementation, we have compiled the most important best practices for the implementation / execution of maintenance activities here.

Data Analysis / Monitoring

To begin with, it must be clear what condition the machines and systems are in. On this basis, the future maintenance strategy to be pursued and the systems required for implementation are selected. 

Technical Equipment

This analysis makes it clear to what extent high-performance maintenance software, additional sensors for machines and other equipment for systems and employees are required. After procurement, care must be taken to ensure proper integration into the processes.

Training / Further Training

Through training, employees learn how to use the CMMS software (Computerized Maintenance Management System) and how to use it efficiently. Such training is essential to ensure that employees use the full potential of the software solutions and that all maintenance activities are carried out according to a clear maintenance plan.

Testing / Optimization

All measures and work are continuously logged and evaluated. This data is used to create reports and regularly check the efficiency of the entire process. The company's own maintenance strategy is thus regularly put to the test and gradually improved.

Typical Mistakes in the Maintenance Process

Based on these best practices, there are also several mistakes that should be avoided when implementing your maintenance activities:

• Process without Strategy

  Your own measures should always be based on an overarching maintenance strategy. Otherwise, there is a high probability that inefficiencies will arise in the process.

• Poor Documentation

  Detailed documentation of all work and measures ensures that potential sources of error are identified and processes are continuously developed over time.

• No Knowledge Transfer

  Maintenance stands and falls with the qualifications and knowledge of your own employees. They must have the opportunity to exchange information with each other and with the system in order to uncover problems and further potential.

Important Trends in Maintenance

The topic of maintenance has only increasingly become the focus of holistic production management in recent years. At the same time, there are already some important developments in this area. 

• Digitalization / Industry 4.0
  The importance of modern sensor technology and deeper networking of machines will continue to shape the industry in the future.

• Sustainability / Energy Efficiency
  Focus on sustainable maintenance measures and practices to improve the energy efficiency of systems.

• Cyber Security
  Strengthening cyber security to protect networked maintenance systems from cyber attacks and data loss.

• Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning
  Use of AI and machine learning for preventive and predictive maintenance in order to predict failures and optimize maintenance measures.

The increased adaptation of artificial intelligence in particular has the potential to revolutionize the topic of maintenance to a certain extent: AI will enable highly effective predictive maintenance in the future, where machine data can be evaluated more accurately and consistently than ever before.

This will significantly increase plant and machine availability and therefore productivity.

The basic measures of maintenance are therefore not just a sub-factor of successful production management. Rather, they are an effective starting point for artificial intelligence in industry as a whole.