Maintenance Management: what is it and how to optimise it?

The success of business management in any sector necessarily depends on efficient maintenance management. In factories, hotels, shops, restaurants and other buildings, maintenance management plays a key role in maximising the operational efficiency of equipment and facilities.

Maintenance management can be defined as the process of maintaining a company’s assets and resources and its main objectives are:

• controlling costs
• controlling time
• managing resources
• ensuring regulatory compliance

This management involves regularly monitoring the operation of machines, equipment, installations and tools. It also prevents, for example, production stoppages due to broken equipment and wasting resources on inefficient maintenance processes.

To avoid being surprised by unforeseen events and technical failures that can disrupt the company’s workflow, maintenance management enables managers to control all processes so that everything flows as intended and without any unexpected failures.

One of the main objectives of maintenance management is to plan and schedule work efficiently. It is necessary to draw up the most appropriate maintenance strategies for equipment and installations, such as Preventive and Corrective Maintenance.

Using these strategies, it is possible to eliminate technical failures and keep equipment, machinery and installations working and available.

What are the benefits of Maintenance Management?

Improving operational efficiency

With normal wear and tear, equipment can become less efficient. Proper management of preventive maintenance will therefore ensure the best operating conditions for the equipment and, in addition, increase its service life.

Saving time

Planned preventive maintenance reduces downtime caused by equipment malfunctions. In this way, time spent on emergency repairs and replacements can be saved.

Ensuring the safety of staff and equipment

Through regular preventive maintenance, not only is the operation of the equipment guaranteed, but it is also guaranteed to operate safely. This also results in less risk for the technicians who are in daily contact with the equipment.

What are the most commonly used types of maintenance?

The role of the maintenance manager is to identify the ideal type of maintenance for each piece of equipment. We will therefore list the main ones and how they apply in each case.

Preventive maintenance

The main objective of preventive maintenance is to reduce future failures, prevent a problem from occurring and avoid corrective maintenance. It must follow a pre-established deadline according to the type of equipment, use or time.

Predictive maintenance

This type of predictive maintenance focuses on implementing a culture of constant monitoring of equipment and assets. It does not require a fixed schedule of inspections. Instead, it relies on the use of software and instruments to assess vibrations, ultrasound, visual inspections, temperature levels and so on.

Corrective maintenance

This type of corrective maintenance  corrects existing faults detected during inspections. A new appointment is then made to carry out the repair. This is usually the most costly type of correction because it requires temporary shutdown of the equipment.

4 tips to ensure efficient maintenance management

1. Managing maintenance costs

To reduce maintenance costs, it is essential to follow the maintenance plans established for each piece of equipment, in order to guarantee its operation and avoid potential breakdowns and failures. Here we talk about asset management, that is, defining the best strategies to be applied to each asset in order to achieve the final goal: the more efficient the asset management is, the lower the costs associated with its maintenance will be.

2. Carrying out maintenance reports

CMMS solutions automate the generation of maintenance reports, allowing maintenance professionals to make decisions faster, without having to search for information in piles of paper or Excel files. On the other hand, the time spent by technicians in the manual elaboration of these reports is reduced and, consequently, the probability of data errors is reduced.

3. Follow up on maintenance indicators

The maintenance indicators measure the quality of operations to achieve the defined objectives, such as reducing the downtime of equipment. They allow you to evaluate the evolution of the technical teams’ performance over time and, this analysis allows the manager to know at what level his team is and what strategies he should bet on to achieve the next goals. Maintenance KPIs are, therefore, a good support to define the path to continuous improvement of the Maintenance department.

4. Investing in maintenance management software

To facilitate this whole process, there are maintenance management software solutions or CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management System). The use of these systems is an added value for management, since it simplifies all these processes, centralising all the information and facilitating communication between managers and maintenance technicians.

Maintenance software enables you to respond to the main objectives of maintenance management, which include scheduling work efficiently and controlling costs and resources to ensure the quality of the company’s products and services.