Plant maintenance or maintenance of any plant with equipment is the biggest behind workplace safety there is. There are a number of philosophies when it comes to maintaining a plant of any type and the equipment that allows it to operate. The choice the plant manager must make is which philosophy makes the most sense for his plant. The decision should be based on the type of industry the plant is involved in and the type of time the plant must spend maintaining its equipment. Plants that are involved in a year-round industry will not have an off-season period to perform preventive maintenance like plants that have a particular season, and therefore a slow or off-season to perform. such preventive maintenance.

For plants that have a slow season, the only logical option for a plant manager would be a preventative maintenance program. In this type of program, the plant manager will rotate equipment for service from year to year. Equipment due for service in a given year will be inspected by a trained inspector inside or outside the company, but this person must know his job very well, if he doesn’t, you may miss something.

If a plant is running year-round, there are a number of maintenance philosophies that a plant manager might decide to run their plant. They could choose a maintenance schedule to practice known as run to failure, with this type of maintenance schedule, plant management will run an piece of equipment to failure, running this type of maintenance will allow equipment in the plant to run smoothly. consistent with the problems. being addressed as they occur. The main drawback to this type of maintenance program is that you need to ensure that you have a good supply of all repair parts on hand for all aspects and functions of the machinery that could fail to minimize the amount of downtime the part of the team. will have. This type can get expensive because you never know what might go wrong, so inventory of parts that might go wrong can become a strain on your budget.

Another maintenance philosophy you might think of would be condition-based or predictive maintenance. Under this plan, equipment will be checked periodically by trained personnel for excessive vibration or a sudden increase in temperature on the outside of the equipment. Once a potential failure is detected, the plant manager will coordinate with all other departments over a period of time to shut down the piece of equipment, then purchase the necessary parts to keep on hand and once the parts arrive and the scheduled time, when the time comes, the repairs will be made. However, this plan is only as good as the personnel conducting the inspection. But ultimately this will depend on whether the plant manager has hired or trained the right person for the job.

Equipment maintenance is never an easy task, but it needs and should be taken seriously, second only to your employees, the equipment in a plant is the lifeline of the plant. If kept running properly the plant operations should run smoothly, if not kept running it could spell disaster for the plant mainly for the bottom line of the plant and ultimately for your staff. So plant managers need to know their equipment, understand their industry, and by all means keep that equipment running by choosing a maintenance plan and following it.

David F. Tibbett, over 20 years of management experience serving three different industries.