SUMMER MAINTENANCE


SCHOOL’S OUT, BUT FOR HOW LONG?


Steve Edgson, Director of Asset Handling explains why it could be beneficial for your company to alter the dates of its summer maintenance.


Works carried out under shutdown conditions carry business costs, and the summer shutdown has major financial implications in terms of parts and labour, and the loss of production. Facility closures can be large-scale, complex, costly and disruptive to the daily operational pulse.


The education sector is a prime example of where the summer months are used for a planned maintenance break, making the most of the downtime to carry out essential repair works. However, as schools, universities and colleges become more focused, by necessity, on maximising income through the commercial use of their facilities, this has become less viable with complicated scheduling making summer maintenance a problem.


Traditionally, many companies plan shutdowns during the summer months when the staff take holidays. An easy improvement opportunity might be to perform a cost/benefit analysis on the timing and move it to the most inexpensive time slot.


Some companies have made substantial savings simply by moving the shutdown away from summer to a low point in the business cycle when product demand is slow. For the leisure and hospitality industry, manufacturers of frozen food, cold drinks, or refrigeration, ventilation and air conditioning companies, for example, any summer downtime must be carefully planned and executed.


A well maintained facility is vital to ensuring optimum productivity, customer and staff satisfaction, and business profitability, and ensuring that a building is maintained to optimum standards is seen as an


38 | TOMORROW’S FM


increasing strategic challenge. Maintenance costs can account for as much as 40% of the operational budget. But, as maintenance techniques become more sophisticated, facilities managers are being presented with an opportunity to take a more positive and proactive approach to maintenance, viewing it as a profit centre, rather than an expense.


Companies invest millions on equipment that needs to be maintained but, more costly than the assets themselves, is the impact on orders when a piece of equipment breaks down or is working poorly. In order to optimise equipment use, and to ensure high uptime, businesses should have a strategic approach to maintenance.


“TRADITIONALLY,


MANY COMPANIES PLAN SHUTDOWNS


DURING THE SUMMER MONTHS WHEN THE STAFF TAKE HOLIDAYS.”


The key to this approach lies in a new perspective of proactive maintenance with real time links to equipment to present opportunities for predictive maintenance through condition monitoring. Condition monitoring technology allows users to make informed decisions on the maintenance, re-engineering and capital investment that is required to run facilities to optimum performance, identifying failures before they occur and creating a meaningful maintenance programme.


Technology, such as the Asset Insight Manager, allows for the continual monitoring of an asset’s performance in real time; the artificial intelligence within the system provides alerts that the asset is behaving abnormally; and asset performance degradation indicators allow engineers to step in ahead of a fault occurring in a planned and controlled manner before they impact the business.


A range of bespoke reports within the system show the degradation over time, the number of alerts that have been generated on the assets, and the mean time between failures, enabling the plant manager to make informed decisions, based on learned performance data and alerts, on the invasive maintenance that needs to be carried out during a shutdown.


Bespoke condition management software can be created to meet any specific requirement, for swimming pools, for example. Asset Handling is currently developing a solution for the automation of readings for conductivity, pH, redox, and chlorine levels through a condition management device that can also monitor assets including pool pumps and heaters.


Through an approach, based on the actual condition of equipment rather than a predetermined schedule, assets can be maintained at a continuously high level of performance, rather than waiting for something to fail, and repairs and maintenance can be prioritised so that the most important systems are repaired first, ensuring the most effective return on investment.


www.assethandling.com twitter.com/TomorrowsFM


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