Time-based and condition-based maintenance strategies are effective in enhancing equipment reliability, but they can come at high downtime costs, requiring the shutdown of equipment or entire production lines.
Opportunistic maintenance provides an opportunity to leverage this downtime to perform corrective or reactive maintenance activities on other units. This reduces the cost of maintenance, allowing you to get more work done during a single downtime period.
Opportunistic maintenance (OM), also called event-driven maintenance, is a systematic method of planning and scheduling a set of proposed maintenance tasks and executing them when there is an unscheduled failure or scheduled downtime.
Advantages of Opportunistic Maintenance
OM helps companies achieve the optimum tradeoff between downtime and maintenance costs without any hazardous outcomes. An hour of downtime in a manufacturing unit can cost about $250K on average. Easy math tells us if the downtime lasts for four hours, it will cost $1 million dollars to the company.
You can compensate for this loss by getting work done that otherwise would require a future shutdown. It’s a simple idea that takes advantage of time and resources which are already dedicated to a maintenance activity. You can use this approach to determine parts which are defective or need to be replaced in the near future and get maintenance technicians to work on these parts whenever there is an opportunity during a downtime. This extends asset lifetime or the mean time to next failure (MTTR) to reduce the frequency of downtime and unwanted consequences.
Roadblocks to Opportunistic Maintenance
Maintenance managers need to determine the right activity at the right time to ensure the success of OM strategies. This decision-making process requires real-time availability of reliable asset data. Unexpected downtime becomes an opportunity for OM tasks. The quick availability of data on assets which requires immediate replacement or will fail in near future is essential to make the most of these opportunities.
Conventional asset management practices have frontline technicians on the shop floor, disconnected from enterprise resource planning (ERP) and enterprise asset management (EAM) systems. Technicians use paper forms, work orders and work instructions to execute maintenance tasks. This gap between frontline workers and back-office systems is a roadblock to leveraging OM strategies.
Mobile EAM solutions help achieve optimal opportunistic maintenance
Connected worker solutions, like Innovapptive’s Mobile EAM suite, bridges this gap through an intuitive mobile solution that connects frontline workers with these data systems. These solutions break down data silos and makes real-time asset information available for every user through mobile devices. Frontline technicians can access work orders and work instructions to efficiently execute opportunistic maintenance. This empowers workers to make data-driven decisions when an unexpected maintenance opportunity comes up, cutting annual downtime and saving maintenance costs.
Want to see a live demo on how Innovapptive’s mobile EAM solution helps you achieve optimal opportunistic maintenance? Book here or call us at 844-464-6668.
