A maintenance strategy is an approach that an organization takes to ensure the availability, reliability and performance of its operating machinery or infrastructure. This strategy includes various measures and activities aimed at maximizing the life of the assets and minimizing downtime.
There are usually four types of industrial maintenance. The first is failure-related and is known as reactive maintenance . If a system fails, repairs are carried out, but the work cannot be planned. There are cases in which this type of maintenance is perfectly acceptable and makes sense: for example, with non-critical or redundant systems where a failure is very unlikely and unpredictable. The failure must not affect safety or quality. However, reactive maintenance also has disadvantages. Since it cannot be planned, failures may have to be remedied quickly, which means that you have to have your own personnel for repairs and spare parts in stock. This is actually unthinkable with critical, complex systems, especially when safety and quality are concerned.
However, there are alternatives, such as preventive maintenance . This strategy involves carrying out certain maintenance work and inspections at regular intervals, replacing spare parts and thus preventing breakdowns. The regularity is determined by time intervals or counter intervals (e.g. after a certain number of operating hours or mileage). If there are known failure patterns or wearing parts that are replaced regularly, preventive maintenance is the right and relatively simple method. It is also the most widespread strategy used by companies today. Its advantages are good planning, complete maintenance records and relatively low inventory levels and therefore storage costs. What is important nowadays is that it can also be handled easily by external service providers. The disadvantages? The consumables can be replaced too early, meaning that the wear and tear on the spare parts is not fully used up. This results in avoidable costs, both in terms of materials and labor.
If you take these factors into account and look at the condition of the system instead of fixed intervals, you arrive at the next type of maintenance strategy - condition-based maintenance . With this type, the condition of the system is monitored (for example using sensors or cameras) and the generated data is fed into the system automatically or manually. Algorithms check specified limit values and maintenance or repairs are triggered if necessary. Condition-based maintenance is particularly useful when failure patterns are unknown. It ensures higher system availability and fewer downtimes. It also makes it possible to optimally determine and plan the time of maintenance. However, getting started with condition monitoring is associated with somewhat higher investment costs: In order to evaluate the data, software is required, as are sensors and cameras. The amount of data collected should not be underestimated - relational databases often reach their limits here.
Particularly critical and expensive systems, where a failure leads to very high revenue losses or consequential damage, benefit from the fourth type of maintenance strategy, which is known as predictive maintenance . Similar to looking into the future, you want to know when a system will fail in order to prevent this failure in time. Sensor data and other information such as historical failures are evaluated using algorithms in order to be able to generate a forecast.
How do you decide which asset to operate with which strategy? Criteria that should be taken into account are the complexity and criticality of the asset, its interconnection with other machines, redundancy, potential safety concerns for the environment, potential repair costs, available repair personnel, available spare parts, the probability of failure, and legal regulations. Since these assets are ideally managed centrally, you should also choose a system such as IBM Maximo, which supports all types of maintenance and therefore also allows a change of maintenance type.
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