Load Entry 3 Software by SuperSystems: Streamlining Data Management

What is Planned Maintenance?

Planned maintenance refers to a proactive approach to equipment management, where maintenance activities are scheduled and carried out based on predetermined plans rather than in response to unexpected breakdowns. The goal of planned maintenance is to optimize equipment performance, extend its lifespan, and reduce the likelihood of unplanned downtime. It involves activities such as routine inspections, preventive maintenance, and predictive maintenance, which help identify potential issues before they result in failures. By focusing on regular upkeep, planned maintenance enhances equipment reliability, minimizes costs associated with reactive repairs, and improves overall operational efficiency.

Key tasks for Planned Maintenance:

• Revise your work procedures to avoid recurring problems
• Lay out a plan for reporting on maintenance management
• Set up a plan for equipment lubrication
• Check your stock quantities to ensure adequate supply and specify stock locations
• Develop a cost management system to reduce the cost of maintenance
• Examine activity management frameworks, identify equipment intervention types, and set the guidelines for their selection.
• Have your maintenance teams contribute to autonomous maintenance

Benefits of Planned Maintenance:

• Enhancement of total equipment efficiency
• Reduction of maintenance costs
• Maintenance technicians can key in on specific tasks allowing for resources to be allocated where needed
• Equipment life increases
• Creates a safer work environment
• Enhancement of product quality

How to Implement Planned Maintenance:

1. Look over your equipment and determine the quality of it so you don’t run into any issues down the road. Make sure your records are updated and equipment failures are noted, as well as maintenance costs so you can get a clear picture of what is needed before moving on. The whole goal of this first step is to get a full understanding of your objectives and what is necessary to complete the objectives.

2. You’ll need to determine environment conditions. Is your equipment in an environment that increases wear and tear? Decide what actions are needed to improve your environment and extend equipment lifespan. These should be permanent solutions to prevent the recurrence of similar issues.

3. Develop a management system. Create systems for failure data management, equipment management, maintenance planning, and inspections. During this process it’s important to build an equipment budgeting system to control what is being spent on parts, drawing, specifications, and more.

4. For this step it’s vital to schedule periodic maintenance. Create a chart for routine maintenance, highlighting which equipment and components will go through maintenance so that there is a plan in place. Along with this, it’s imperative that all procedures are up to date; this means procedures for material, operational, inspection, and approval are essential.

5. At this time you’ll want to ensure all evaluators of your systems are equipped with the knowledge necessary to analyze equipment processes, then prepare diagnostic instruments for use. Once ready, create a chart for predictive maintenance, choosing all equipment that will be conducting predictive maintenance. Make sure all diagnostic equipment and instruments are ready to go.

6. Lastly, you need to evaluate the planned maintenance system by determining the growth in equipment reliability, failures/stoppages, MTBF (mean time between failures), and the frequency of those failures. The next crucial step is to assess improvements in maintainability by examining the frequency of periodic and predictive maintenance, and MTTR (mean time to repair). One final task is to calculate costs. Have costs reduced within maintenance expenses and maintenance resources?

Planned Maintenance with LE3

The SSI Load Entry system is a module of our SuperDATA SCADA package that provides the next level of visibility, management and traceability for heat treat processes.  The load entry provides a customizable overview of assets, a recipe database, a parts database, integration with all SuperDATA tools, load tracking, efficiency reporting in the areas of utilization and gap reasons between loads, and much more. As with anything SSi develops and manufactures, we are looking to provide the best integrated tools yielding operational efficiencies in heat treating and the areas of scheduling and maintenance are just that.

Implementing planned maintenance with LE3 involves creating a structured approach to managing equipment and maintenance based on usage or load data. With the help of LE3’s effortless tracking, management, and information retrieval you can collect accurate load data logs that track the operational hours and load conditions of machinery or systems.

Maintenance schedules can be created to align with predefined usage thresholds and industry specifications (AMS 2750, CQI-9, etc), ensuring equipment is serviced before any potential failure or non-compliance.

With Load Entry 3 “Maintenance” and “Scheduling”, maintenance and furnace activities can be planned to minimize the impact on production and maximize equipment utilization to avoid costly unplanned downtime. Regular analysis from LE3 helps optimize the maintenance intervals, ensuring that machinery runs efficiently. By aligning maintenance efforts with load-based data, companies can proactively extend the lifespan of equipment, improve reliability, reduce unplanned downtime, and cut down on costs.

Planned activities to address industry specifications ensure compliance of equipment.  The integration between LE3 and maintenance will prevent equipment for being used to run parts where equipment compliance has expired.