Introduction: Maintenance and Production Synergy
Maintenance management is a vital part of operations management and plays a crucial role in ensuring assets are reliable, efficient, and cost-effective. For operations managers, maintenance professionals, and anyone involved in asset-heavy industries, understanding maintenance in production and operations management is essential for achieving optimal business outcomes. This article explores how maintenance and production teams can collaborate to boost asset performance, why this synergy is critical, and practical steps to implement shared goals and processes. Maintenance management is the systematic process of planning, organizing, and controlling maintenance-related activities and upkeep of physical assets to ensure that they remain effective, safe, and cost-efficient throughout their lifecycle. Maintenance in production and operations management ensures equipment operates at peak performance, minimizing downtime, maximizing asset lifespan, and guaranteeing consistent product quality. By the end of this article, you will understand the importance of integrating maintenance and production efforts, the benefits of shared KPIs, and actionable strategies to drive operational efficiency.
The Role of Operations Management
Many asset-heavy companies still have a siloed structure in which departments such as Maintenance and Operations (or: Production) have their separate goals and KPIs. Operations management plays a crucial role in overseeing and optimizing production processes, including quality control, waste reduction, and efficiency. Delivering services is a key function of operations, encompassing all tasks involved in providing products or services to customers.
The Value of Maintenance Management
Effective maintenance management is essential for ensuring the smooth running and efficiency of overall business operations, as it supports sustained production, reduces downtime, and helps maintain competitiveness. Maintenance refers to the set of activities aimed at asset management, safety, and operational efficiency, including preventive, corrective, and predictive tasks to ensure optimal performance and longevity of equipment.
Managing resources—coordinating labor, equipment, and materials—is a core aspect of both maintenance and production, optimizing workflows and reducing waste. Additionally, production capacity is a critical factor in aligning manufacturing outputs with demand and maintaining efficient operations.
Understanding the Importance of Preventive Maintenance Management
Understanding why maintenance management is important is a cornerstone of any successful manufacturing operation. It directly influences the efficiency, productivity, and profitability of a business. Maintenance management is the systematic process of planning, organizing, and controlling maintenance-related activities and upkeep of physical assets to ensure that they remain effective, safe, and cost-efficient throughout their lifecycle. Effective maintenance management involves a strategic approach to maintaining equipment and assets, ensuring they are properly maintained to minimize the risk of equipment failures and downtime.
Preventive maintenance schedules regular upkeep to avert equipment failures and extend the life of an asset. In manufacturing operations, the importance of maintenance management cannot be overstated. Properly maintained equipment operates more efficiently, leading to higher production rates and better product quality. By implementing effective maintenance management practices, companies can significantly reduce the likelihood of unexpected equipment failures, which can cause costly production delays and impact overall operational efficiency. Labor costs are a significant component of operational expenses, and effective maintenance management can help control these costs by reducing overtime, emergency repairs, and inefficient resource allocation.
Moreover, maintenance management is not just about fixing problems as they arise. Preventative maintenance plays a critical role in this proactive approach by ensuring equipment is regularly serviced to prevent failures. In contrast, relying solely on reactive maintenance can lead to unexpected breakdowns and increased costs. This type of reactive approach is often referred to as breakdown maintenance, which involves unplanned, reactive repairs performed when equipment failures occur. Timely interventions in breakdown maintenance are crucial to restore machinery and minimize production losses. It involves proactive maintenance strategies, such as preventive and predictive maintenance, to identify potential issues before they become major problems. Effective maintenance management also ensures that maintenance activities are planned and scheduled in a way that does not disrupt the production schedule, helping to maintain continuous operations. This proactive approach helps in extending the life of equipment, optimizing maintenance costs, and ensuring that production schedules are not disrupted. Preventive and predictive maintenance also help extend asset lifespans, resulting in increased ROI and safer working conditions.
In summary, maintenance management is essential for maintaining the reliability and efficiency of manufacturing operations. By focusing on effective maintenance management, companies can improve their operational efficiency, reduce downtime, and enhance their overall productivity. Improving operational efficiency is a key outcome of effective maintenance management, as it streamlines processes, reduces waste, and supports sustained business growth.
With a clear understanding of why maintenance management matters, the next step is to align teams around shared objectives.
Determine and Embrace a Common Goal
When working towards a common objective, a multidisciplinary team can more easily scope improvement potential and detect bottlenecks sooner (without addressing blame to one department). Although departments have different perspectives and other responsibilities, it will promote transparency and, therefore, true collaboration. The departments (or silos) have to understand that they need each other and that everyone will want the best result for the whole site. Collaboration between production teams and maintenance is especially important, as aligning their activities and improving communication helps streamline the production process and ensures operational goals are met.
Everything the maintenance department does is to enable production to create as many products of high quality as the customers want. Maintaining existing equipment is essential to maximize its lifespan, performance, and safety, ensuring operational efficiency and preventing costly breakdowns. Effective management of maintenance resources is crucial for enabling production to meet high-quality standards. This is where you can find the common ground; good installation performance means good production whereas no production (i.e. bad installation performance) leads to dissatisfied customers. The maintenance team plays a crucial role here by using maintenance management software to receive proactive alerts about potential machine issues, allowing them to intervene before major breakdowns occur. Embracing the common goal can be vital to organizational success.
A favorite KPI to use to this end is Overall Equipment Effectiveness (OEE). The percentage is measured by multiplying availability, performance and quality. Equipment performance is a key metric measured and optimized to achieve maximum productivity and efficiency. All of those OEE parameters are influenced by both Maintenance and Operations with Maintenance focusing on realizing maximum asset availability and reliability and Operations aiming to achieve the best production quality and highest reliability. In other words, the overlapping focus of OEE makes it a good KPI for a joint OEE improvement goal.
Transitioning from shared goals, the next step is to establish transparent measurement and collaboration tools.
Set Up and Use a Shared Key Performance Indicators Dashboard
Once a common objective has been determined together, the KPIs to measure its success will follow. A shared KPI dashboard can be a great tool to collaborate in. It offers full transparency with standardized insights and preferably includes realistic (internal) benchmarks. One thing to keep in mind is that one condition for success for a shared KPI dashboard is that data from IT and OT systems are connected. Integrating maintenance management software can significantly aid in this process by tracking and analyzing maintenance data, which helps in extending asset life, reducing downtime, and supporting proactive maintenance strategies. Leveraging performance data enables organizations to optimize production processes and increase profitability. Additionally, scheduling and managing planned maintenance tasks with tools like CMMS is essential to optimize equipment uptime and reduce costs. Inventory management is also a crucial component of comprehensive production operations, as it plays a key role in resource coordination and enhancing efficiency within manufacturing workflows. While this can be a big task, it is highly recommended to put in the work. This does not only benefit your current situation but is also paramount to accelerating your Digital Transformation as connected data and systems are part of the building blocks to implement or boost the digitalization of your Asset Performance Management.
The KPIs to include in a collective dashboard depend on the shared goal. Some examples that are used in successful companies include:
It is important to note that over maintenance can lead to increased costs, waste, and unnecessary risks. Balancing maintenance frequency is essential to avoid these drawbacks and ensure efficient operations.
With shared KPIs in place, the next step is to define and implement clear processes for collaboration.
Succes story: Shared BI Platform Increases Efficiency with 26%
An Oil and Gas operator wanted to connect maintenance and operations data from several systems and sources to give end users actionable insights and improve efficiency. The business intelligence (BI) tool that was developed, connected live data from the Enterprise Asset Management (EAM) system, Condition Monitoring system, production information and wells data and more. The BI tool delivers automated dashboards and business insights. This new way of working was estimated to save 26% man-hours and extended the line of sight for maintaining Safety Critical Assets from one week to six months. Download the case and read more.
Define and Implement a Clear Process
The common KPI dashboard promotes working in one process that both Maintenance and Operations participate in. If you haven't done so yet, use a risk-based approach to determine the criticality of the equipment; this is not done by Maintenance alone, all disciplines and job levels should be involved.
Risk-Based Equipment Criticality
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Involve all relevant disciplines and job levels in determining equipment criticality.
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Use a risk-based approach to prioritize assets based on their impact on production and safety.
Routine Inspections and Condition-Based Maintenance
Routine inspections are crucial in this context, as they help identify potential issues early and keep equipment operating efficiently and safely. Immediate maintenance can be triggered by advanced sensors or software that detect abnormal vibrations or faults, enabling prompt repair actions to prevent extended downtime and costly damages. Training employees to properly inspect, install, and calibrate sensors is essential for effective condition-based maintenance.
Coordinating Maintenance with Production Schedules
Effective maintenance coordination with production schedules ensures that parts, tools, and labor are available when needed, minimizing workflow disruptions. We advise setting up weekly KPI meetings to determine the improvement potential based on the KPI dashboard. For example:
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If the dashboard shows that several equipment types have unacceptable production loss due to failure, the next step can be a joint Root Cause Analysis (first tackling the prioritized equipment).
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After that, everyone's part to solve the issue should be defined before getting the job done.
In many successful partnerships between Maintenance and Operations, we also see that short daily check-ins, in which everyone reports their progress, help to stay on track. On the shop floor, work management tools such as task lists, kanban boards, and calendars help visualize and track daily work, production flow, and deadlines in real time.
With clear processes in place, the focus shifts to nurturing adoption and building a collaborative culture.
Nurture Adoption of the New Way of Working
The key to success for a productive collaboration is getting your people to embrace the change and common goals. Maintenance and operations together play a crucial role in achieving business objectives by fostering collaboration and shared responsibility. This holistic way of working asks for a big mindset shift which needs to be patiently nurtured in order for the workforce to come out of their siloed shells and adopt it. Maintenance and operations together allow companies to stick to safety regulations and implement best practices in their respective industries.
Steps to Nurture Adoption
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Management needs to show active leadership and embrace the partnership and process.
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Make it part of people's purpose and remit; clarify how each job contributes to realizing the KPIs.
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Let employees experience ownership and have this promoted by managers.
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Develop and roll out a solid communications strategy to inform everyone directly and indirectly involved in the company.
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Train everyone directly involved and regularly check in to keep knowledge fresh.
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Regular checks reduce defects, boosting customer satisfaction and reducing the cost of poor quality.
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Share best practices and celebrate success together.
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Emphasize the importance of scheduled maintenance based on machine usage data to ensure reliability and continuous operation, thus reducing detrimental downtime.
Succes story: Global EAM system roll out with quick ROI for Vanderlande
One company that benefited from this holistic way of working is Vanderlande. They paid a lot of attention to their people and culture when rolling out a new EAM system on a global scale. The system ensured necessary maintenance, which helped in maintaining equipment and improving job satisfaction. Due to realizing internal adoption quickly, the Return on Investment of the project was high. Job satisfaction also increased as people indicated that the new process made their work less complex with fewer problems occurring. Download and read the case study here.
Leveraging Asset Improvement Mappings (AIM) and APM Assessments
In the Asset Improvement Mappings (AIM), our APM assessments, we always flag the opportunity for improvement in cross-departmental collaboration. Realizing a sustainable partnership between departments is an important success factor to improve production output, highlight the benefits of maintenance management, minimize Total Cost of Ownership and accelerate Digital Transformation.
Conclusion: Improve Operational Efficiency
Starting with connected data and systems and tools such as KPI dashboards to process improvements and internal adoption of the new roles, responsibilities and way of working; all of the discussed changes improve your Ability to Perform (better) through a holistic approach to asset performance. Changing to a united way of working for Maintenance and Production takes a big organizational change but can also improve asset performance. Maintenance in production and operations management ensures equipment operates at peak performance, minimizing downtime, maximizing asset lifespan, and guaranteeing consistent product quality. This can minimize Total Cost of Ownership by preventing costly repairs while also realizing a higher job satisfaction among your workforce.
📊 Download free eBook on improving asset performance
📰 Continue Reading
- Whitepaper: How to Drive Performance with Asset Management
- Checklist: Overall Equipment Effectiveness cheat sheet
- Chemical plant realizes maintenance maturity growth with Asset Improvement Program
- Global Enterprise Asset Management System rollout for Vanderlande
- Asset Management: 7 Steps to Performance Improvement
- Service: Preventive Maintenance Optimization
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