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Maintenance Procedures - Best Practice consists of? 1

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Trodel

Mining
Dec 17, 2002
1
I am presently looking at the maintenance procedure setup in my plant. The question is, are we doing things correctly? What is the best practice for maintenance procedures? How far does one go into a procedure......, before it actually becomes a training document?

The bottom line, what are the best practice elements of a good maintenance procedure?
 
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Maint procedure begins at the equipment manufacturers guidelines. This would apply to everything from a job shop to a nuclear power plant. If you don't have mfrs or owners manuals on all of your equipment, get them and use them for your basis. Owners manuals (with the exception of some cheap China import goods) will almost always give you the item and the frequency. Other than that, PM is usually set according to historical data. I used to work in a plant where maint cycles were strictly non-scheduled, but there were 1 or 2 people whose job it was to monitor oil levels, amp draw, filter pressure, etc etc, on an ONGOING (hourly)basis, and it worked fine. I've also worked in other plants where PM was followed religiously TO THE SCHEDULE. I personally think scheduled PM is a good idea, and let the operators take authority for the monitoring of conditions. Good Luck.
 
Hire competent maintenance personal. Install lockout, fire and emergency procedures as these are typically required by law. Use specific resources for each one ie: fire dept recommendations for fire procedures. Does production have procedures in place?. Great place to start. Majortiy of maintenance requirements stem from productions mishandling equipment.
 
The best maintenace procedures are written using a writing style guide so you use only approved verbs, acronyms, etc. You used to be able to tell who wrote a procedure but when you follow approved procedure writing methods they all look like they were written by the same person. This is good for your maint people. This is step one to procedure excellence.
Step two is to have experienced maint people write the procedures or floor oriented engineers.
Step three is to have a review process so the right departments have a chance to comment on the drafts, i.e safety, engineering, environmental, etc.
Step four is two have a new procedure validated in the field before it is permanently issued.
This is nuclear style of writing procedures and can be expensive but is high in quality.
If you go into too much detail you may insult your trades staff, not enough you will have an incident. You have to balance it to your people and the importance of the job.
 
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