Reactive maintenance, which is usually unplanned and urgent, can increase the cost of maintenance operation management, overhead, safety risks, and plant equipment’s service life. But this can be avoided.
It’s not an easy task for maintenance managers to balance resources against demands. Reactive maintenance, also known as run-to-failure, is one area that has a significant impact on the bottom line of a company’s budget. There’s always a need to manage this issue.
So, to effectively manage reactive maintenance, you need to form an emergency repair management strategy.
Here, every manager will find the 6 crucial requirements needed to develop and manage emergency maintenance tasks. Other elemental strategies could also be included following particular needs, but these six are the basis.
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Let’s begin.
- Make a list of equipment reactively maintained: All equipment is not the same. They vary in purpose. While specific equipment plays a vital role in plant production and customer service, others may seldomly be used or lying redundant.
Write down the equipment that can be managed using reactive maintenance – those that shouldn’t come under preventive maintenance. In this list, ensure you add equipment that is seldom used, redundant, or not critical.
- Make sure reactive maintenance doesn’t exceed 15% of total maintenance: After compiling the list of equipment needing reactive maintenance, work out what it will take to maintain them reactively. This task should not go beyond 15% of the total maintenance capacity.
If there’s a plant that is not functioning this tolerance, it should be strategically included in the list for preventive and predictive maintenance. To help with this, you can use an effective CMMS system to spot equipment that is critical and the issues they’re having and establish and activate proactive maintenance programs.
- Key performance indicators (KPIs) should be developed, maintained, and monitored: Measurement is key to proper management. When it comes to sophisticated maintenance operations, it’s very important to measure. Relevant KPIs should be established to keep track of the efficacy of reactive maintenance and preventive maintenance programs.
To know how well or worse each program is doing, KPIs like the quality of product, mean time to repair, planned downtime, productivity, or mean time between failure should be monitored and evaluated.
- Set up formal procedures for fast response emergency repairs: Should there be a sudden failure of equipment, it can in no small extent destroy the stability of the department in question. The indirect consequence of these emergencies is additional costs and the negative effect it has on budgets.
Every properly managed maintenance firm needs to have established formal procedures that can be acted upon in an emergency. This procedure dictates the person or group, the time, and how to reactively take care of a sudden equipment failure while the rest of the departments can carry on their functions without any significant disruptions.
- Make sure there is a sufficient and ready workforce to take care of emergencies: It’s very typical for emergency repairs to happen in every maintenance operation, and it does occur at odd hours. Following this undeniable reality, a reactive maintenance strategy should incorporate into its budget and schedule enough standby resources.
Keeping an inventory of extra spares may also help see to it that reactive repair work goes on without any hassles or delays.
- Manage preventative maintenance to see that 10% of the plan covers completed PM workload: The essence of preventive maintenance is to ensure critical equipment are steady and running to prevent expensive downtime in production.
Should the actual PM maintenance differ greatly from the planned schedule, the outcome may be an emergency breakdown. The proper thing should be that there’s a close match between the time the preventative maintenance workload is done and the planned time of completion.
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More on developing a strategy for reactive maintenance
Every functional reactive maintenance should ensure that the deviation from the tasks’ actual completion dates should not go beyond +/- 10% of the planned dates. For instance, if a piece of equipment is scheduled for preventative maintenance every 60 days, the actual maintenance should be done 6 days before or after the scheduled time.
Keeping an eye on this measure will guarantee that reactive maintenance is performed to a minimum.
Bottom line
“If you fail to plan, then you have planned to fail”. This saying is practical. Apart from plants, reactive maintenance is seen in nearly all cases, and so it is required. We all know that no one can predict emergencies, but establishing a structured and formal procedure to take care of them is very important in our competitive space.
A working and properly managed reactive maintenance strategy demand that the method and formal procedures be planned and documented.
Darren Trumbler is a versatile content writer specializing in B2B technology, marketing strategies, and wellness. With a knack for breaking down complex topics into engaging, easy-to-understand narratives, Darren helps businesses communicate effectively with their audiences.
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