Where do you start a maintenance routine? Well, before performing the maintenance itself, many steps must be taken for the result to happen as expected. A maintenance routine starts long before the team’s work. Everything precedes the maintenance analysis, supported by organised planning, and methodologies that allow the development of solutions under constant supervision.

When we talk about maintenance planning, it is worth remembering: there is no point in investing in new technologies if the company does not commit to, even internally, spreading the new mindset around the care and preservation of its own assets.

Learn about four tools for maintenance analysis

There are several options on the market. But all the alternatives that focus on facilitating maintenance analysis are also aimed at controlling costs, organising work schedules, and ensuring that the company performs its entire maintenance routine efficiently.

In such a competitive scenario, maintaining compliance – i.e. being in line – with recent innovations and technologies is a challenge. But having the business up to date with the latest innovations is a way to keep it competitive in the market, without the risk of a steep drop in profits.

Let’s agree: failures can happen at any time, but a stalled machine only brings losses. That’s why drawing up a maintenance plan and having good tools at your disposal is a key differential. Here are 4 options that can help your company.

PDCA Cycle

As we have said, before executing you must plan. This tool here will allow your team to organise their ideas and split the work into several stages so that everything goes well – and the final result is achieved. The acronym PDCA refers to the set of practices necessary to ensure a good result: Plan, Do, Check, and Act – reaction according to the work evaluation.

The approach begins in the planning stage and goes through the first phase of testing. These results are evaluated by the team so that, from then on, the solution is implemented in the execution phase.

5W2H

You can bet: the acronym causes more confusion than the methodology involved.

This tool can help your company organise maintenance tasks in a very functional checklist! Just follow the logical reasoning sequence it proposes. See below what the fundamental steps are:

  • What?
  • When?
  • Who?
  • Where?
  • Why?
  • How?
  • How much?

By answering these questions, it becomes possible to have a broad view of the problem.

Total Productive Maintenance (TPM)

The acronym refers to Total Productive Maintenance. It is a methodology created to progressively modify the techniques previously adopted by the company to increase the production cycle of the equipment.

Among other benefits, this tool allows for an autonomous maintenance routine, since the problems appear simplified, allowing production operators to perform the necessary repairs.

Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM)

Reliability Centered Maintenance is nothing more than a strategy to optimise a maintenance program that already exists in the company, but that doesn’t fully work when executed. Based on techniques that take the economic aspect into account, maintenance strategies are optimised so that productivity is maintained.

According to this process, the trend is that each asset in the company has a specific maintenance plan.

Extra tip: use a Maintenance Management Software

Maintenance management software helps your staff manage assets in real-time. The goal is to concentrate all relevant information in a single platform to facilitate internal communication, allow for more rigorous control of operations, and have a more effective decision-making process.

👨‍💻 Infraspeak, for instance, offers a specialised maintenance management solution that keeps track of the progress of every corrective and preventive maintenance task, besides creating real-time reports to aid in desicion-making. With just a few clicks it is possible to trace the whole maintenance landscape of your company! See more details here and request a free demo.