Five Ways to Reduce Maintenance Costs

Maintenance budgets (like other budgets these days) are under pressure. Even with the budget you have, it’s difficult to find, attract, train, and retain qualified workers. And the equipment is becoming increasingly complex, making additional training necessary. Somehow, you need to cut costs without cutting into your ability to adequately maintain the production equipment and the electrical infrastructure upon which it depends upon.

You just might succeed if you implement one or more of these five tips:

1. Outsource. Certain things can be done much more efficiently by a specialist firm. Annual electrical testing is an example. It’s often done in-house to “save money,” rendering the exercise almost useless because most of the recommended testing (per the applicable standards) isn’t done and what is done may not provide usable results due to lack of expertise and lack of specialized equipment. Assess what functions your in-house team is actually capable of doing proficiently and compare the assessment results to the requirements of industry standards such as IEEE 30007.2. Get that work done on a capital request, so it doesn’t get charged to the maintenance budget.
2. Downsize. It used to be thought that having enough spare parts on hand to fix anything that could conceivably break in the next 20 years was smart. This turns out not to be the case. Correctly sizing the spare parts inventory is a specialty; hire someone to perform an analysis (do this on a capital request). One of the key findings in such analyses over the past couple of decades is many spare parts are not fit for service by the time someone attempts to put them into service. Motors, for example, have to be maintained even if sitting on a shelf — and this is almost never done. If it is done, that’s another use of maintenance resources. Is it a use you can afford? Don’t do it, and you may end up installing a motor that has old lubricant, a bent shaft, or some other problem. And many spare parts are obsolete; they just sit there indefinitely even though they will never be used.
3. Kit. Many maintenance tasks can be made far less time intensive through simple practices such as kitting. Rather than have the maintenance tech spend half an hour gathering the necessary parts, consumables, tools, and test equipment every time Procedure X is performed, make a Procedure X kit. The kit should also include a list of what is in the kit. A lower level maintenance person can easily maintain these kits, performing kit maintenance in the shop. You probably also know that half hour referred to earlier is just the first pass. Somebody always forgets something and has to make another round trip the shop to get it. You can eliminate many hours of wasted top tech time with kitting.
4. Upgrade. If your power tools and test equipment are more than a few years old, you probably are leaving big efficiency gains unclaimed. To determine whether you are, carefully walk through commonly repeated tasks to see where frustration exists or where “indirect” time is spent. Indirect time is time spent setting up, cleaning up, or in some other way doing work that doesn’t involve performing the actual maintenance steps — for example, filling out a paper form instead of wirelessly updating the CMMS with measurement data or running portable cords when a battery powered tool would make that unnecessary.
5. Eliminate. Do any of your maintenance procedures call for taking vibration readings on motors? This is a waste of time. Add vibration monitors, and eliminate that manual task. Many devices now contain self-diagnostics with auto-reporting, so doing the same diagnostic manually doesn’t make sense. Look at motor drives, circuit breakers, and other equipment you can upgrade (on a capital request, of course) to reduce the load on maintenance. You can eliminate manual performance of many maintenance tasks through automation and still get the purpose of the task realized. But also consider eliminating some maintenance tasks simply because performing them isn’t cost-effective. Manufacturers often have a person with little or no maintenance experience write their maintenance procedures and that person will often try to cover all the bases. Some bases simply don’t need to be covered, and you could do a failure mode analysis to see what those are for a given piece of equipment. This does not mean you should assume the manufacturer’s recommendations aren’t good. It means you should evaluate those rather than blindly execute them all. You may find some of the recommendations are conditions of warranty; don’t change those without a written agreement from the manufacturer.