Business Core · Manufacturing Operations · Module
Maintenance
Keeping equipment capable of producing. Planned maintenance is inconvenient; unplanned maintenance is expensive and arrives at the worst moment.
The idea
How it works
Maintenance deferred is not maintenance avoided. It is rescheduled to a moment chosen by the equipment rather than by the organisation, and that moment is reliably during peak demand.
The right regime differs by asset. Preventive scheduling suits equipment that wears predictably, condition monitoring suits equipment that gives warning, and running to failure is legitimate where the consequence is small and the spare is on the shelf.
Working with it
In practice
- 01
Choose a regime per asset
Preventive, predictive or run-to-failure, based on consequence and on whether failure gives warning.
- 02
Protect the maintenance window
The window that is always given up to production is not a schedule.
- 03
Record downtime by cause
Repeated causes are design problems, not maintenance problems.
- 04
Hold spares for the constraint
A cheap part that stops the bottleneck is expensive to be without.
One level in
The components of maintenance
A component is something that exists afterwards which did not exist before — a deliverable or a mechanism, not an intention.
Deferred maintenance is rescheduled by the equipment, and it chooses peak demand.
The other modules in manufacturing operations
Capacity planning
Matching what can be produced to what will be needed, over a horizon long enough that capacity can still be changed.
LearnProduction flow
How work moves through production — batch sizes, queues and handovers — and where it spends time without being worked on.
LearnQuality management
Ensuring output meets specification, and finding out why when it does not. Detection is the fallback; prevention is the work.
Learn