Maintenance Plan
This topic covers:
The final steps in the analysis process involve collection of the maintenance tasks for individual items/ systems into work packages known as the Maintenance Plan.
Compilation of the maintenance plan is a function of many variables, which can be classified into three general categories:
- Item/system maintenance requirements
- Maintenance management requirements
- Operational requirements.
The inter-relationship of requirements from these three general categories does not enable the definition of the maintenance plan and maintenance intervals in absolute terms and no established procedural method is available to objectively define the optimum set of servicing for a particular application.
The set of maintenance tasks defined for a site will normally include preventive and corrective tasks, and condition monitoring. Each type of task serves a specific purpose as part of the scheduled maintenance requirements for the site.
The maintenance plan is only formed after evaluation of the tasks that must be performed on individual items and systems.
The process of developing the maintenance plan involves several interrelated steps, shown in the diagram below. Specific decisions must be reached on:
- The grouping of tasks into work packages, for input to WIMS as Job Cards or Advice Notes
- The interval at which each work package is to be performed.
Each decision is based on the recommendations for each individual maintenance task, taking into consideration operational and maintenance management requirements.
Once the raw maintenance plan has been developed, the planned maintenance workload should be distributed across the maintenance cycle.
The raw maintenance plan consists of many individual activities of varying frequencies. Many of these are quite small and to attempt to do the work this way or to manage it would be inefficient.
Optimizing the maintenance plan involves grouping individual tasks into logical "packages", of identical or similar intervals. It may be more efficient, in some cases, to amend recommended intervals for individual tasks to allow further grouping.
The optimization of the maintenance plan should take into account:
- Operational requirements
- Labor resources available
- Projected breakdown maintenance workload.
Resource leveling takes into account the planned maintenance workload and smoothes the labor requirements within the maintenance cycle. Also, it takes into consideration the breakdown workload established from historical records.
The workload should be balanced as far as possible, to ensure the labor resource commitment does not exceed available levels.