By Andrew Inman, P.Eng., CRL, CMRP – Manager | Reliability & Maintenance Management
Maintaining your facility is like tending to a garden. A garden requires regular care and maintenance. Likewise, your facility’s physical assets require constant attention to ensure smooth operations. With a proper strategy and plan to provide this attention, maintenance activities can become more organized. Better organized maintenance leads to decreased costs, higher productivity, and increased asset lifespans. In this blog, let’s examine the importance of a maintenance management plan and explain how adopting one could take your organization to another level.
Let’s start with asset management. This practice involves managing an asset’s entire lifecycle, from acquisition to disposal. Asset management ensures that your facility’s assets – whether it be a sports arena or a recycling plant – work effectively, efficiently, and remain in good condition throughout their lifespan.
An asset management plan outlines where current asset management efforts stand, assesses changes needed to meet future needs, and outlines the high-level actions you need to take to get there.
Consider a water treatment facility. The asset management plan may include actions to sustain objectives such as producing safe, clean drinking water for customers at the lowest cost and with the lowest environmental impact. The asset management strategy would also outline items such as the current state of the treatment plant’s electrical systems, pumps, or building structure, the expected quality and reliability of water supply, the planned actions to ensure optimal plant performance, and the funding sources and budget allocations to support the planned actions.
This is where a Maintenance Management Plan comes into the picture. A Maintenance Management Plan provides the essential pieces to guide the maintenance, operations, and asset management groups, ensuring their activities align with the organization’s overall goals and objectives as outlined in the asset management plan. The Maintenance Management Plan considers various factors such as equipment reliability, risk management, cost optimization, regulatory compliance, and the overall lifecycle of assets.
Why Do We Need a Maintenance Management Plan?
A Maintenance Management Plan helps connect maintenance and asset management objectives and strategies, ensuring they align with larger goals. It also helps sustain service levels with optimized resources, meaning organizations can achieve their desired outcomes while minimizing costs.
For example, a Maintenance Management Plan offers the necessary guidance to effectively manage maintenance activities and assets within a water treatment facility. In this case, a chemical dosing system would be identified as critical in a water treatment facility. The Maintenance Management Plan would outline the strategy development tools required to identify the tasks for the dosing system, such as Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM). The RCM analysis would then define the maintenance tasks, including types and frequencies, required to sustain the service of proper chemical dosing.
Another benefit of a Maintenance Management Plan is that it helps organizations keep institutional knowledge. Losing skilled personnel due to retirement can be challenging. A maintenance management plan ensures that all employees are onboarded and trained effectively to follow consistent practices. All employees now have access to the knowledge needed to succeed.
A Maintenance Management Plan also supports the shift from less reactive to more proactive maintenance practices. It can help you project and forecast proactive and corrective maintenance tasks by identifying the maintenance and operating costs needed to achieve proposed service levels. This means that organizations can focus on preventing issues rather than simply reacting to them after they happen.
Finally, a Maintenance Management Plan helps change the perception that maintenance is a “cost center” or that “maintenance is a problem only for the maintenance department.” A Maintenance Management Plan can help change the mindset around maintenance, which has a positive impact on both your asset and your entire organization. Soon, you’ll see maintenance as an opportunity to improve operations rather than simply as a burden or cost.
In conclusion, just as a garden requires proper maintenance and care to thrive, a water treatment facility requires a Maintenance Management Plan to operate effectively and efficiently. By connecting maintenance and asset management objectives and strategies, sustaining service levels with optimized resources, and supporting the shift to more proactive maintenance practices, a Maintenance Management Plan helps organizations achieve their desired outcomes while minimizing costs.
By developing a Maintenance Management Plan, organizations can lead a better-engineered and evolving future for their facilities.
Contact me to explore how to optimize maintenance so your teams are working on the right things.
