Imagine being responsible for a sizable project that handles complicated big machines. Many things can go wrong and put the personnel and the environment in danger. This is why Operations and Maintenance management, also called operational management or O&M is important. With O&M maintenance and care of assets of a company that do not require in-depth technical knowledge of how it functions is performed.
It is a combination of general maintenance, management, training, budgeting, and business processes that are used collectively for the proper functioning of a facility. Typically goals of O&M depend on the organization, but the customary practices are consistent across the board. Why include operations and maintenance to your projects? You can benefit from the following:
1. Protect Investments
Facilities usually keep equipment that is a significant investment from an organization and performing routine maintenance on them is of critical importance. Keeping them in operating order by performing upkeep will prevent a production facility from derailing into an unexpected and potentially catastrophic failure of a machine.
Preventative maintenance also has the benefit of extending the life span of equipment and assets, ensuring that they last as long as possible and provide a better return on investments. By keeping a close eye to the state of your equipment will also help with expected budgeting for replacement at the end of the asset’s life span. This protects investors from unplanned expenses and improves forecasting capabilities. Since these activities are considered low-cost and are performed in addition to technicians’ other tasks, it is regarded a cost-effective method for ensuring long-term reliability, safety, and asset uptime.
2. Optimize Labour Efficiency
Creating a detailed preventive maintenance plan has the potential to change maintenance departments. A long-term routine maintenance plan puts important tasks on the calendar in a tangible way, reducing the chances they will slip through the cracks and prevents technical personnel from becoming overwhelmed with unexpected repairs at the last minute. These plans usually include generating schedules, assigning specific tasks to individual technicians and monitoring work order requests to track productivity.
3. Enhance Asset Performance
Other than keeping an asset from breaking down, routine maintenance also contributes to keeping it operating better. Without designed maintenance, smaller issues can be overlooked like a machine running too hot with noticeable friction or leaking fluid. Preventive maintenance tasks help keep assets running at peak performance and in peak condition, making them more efficient and profitable.
4. Promote Awareness and Accountability
By enforcing standardised frequent maintenance and inspections, managers promote a greater familiarity and awareness of assets by staff. This benefit of increased visibility into the workflow of maintenance increases attention and accountability throughout the organisation. Staff are not able to notice a machine making an unusual noise if they do not know what it usually sounds like, so technicians can catch a large percentage of problems early by becoming more familiar with the asset. When assigning tasks to specific technicians instead of relying on a general pool of technician, managers create an atmosphere of accountability. If employees are consistently falling behind on scheduled tasks managers can assess performance factors and make adjustments to ensure standards are realistic.
5. Increase Planned-to-Unplanned Maintenance Ratio
Managers use a metric called planned maintenance percentage to qualitatively measure technical team performance. It refers to the percentage of planned relative to unplanned maintenance performed. Tracking this metric helps management understand how much maintenance performed on an individual asset is preventive rather than reactive, which can help identify upkeep costs and determine when an asset has reached the end of its life span.
To calculate this metric, use the formula Planned Percentage = (scheduled maintenance time / total maintenance hours) x 100. In an ideal system, 90% of maintenance is planned ahead of time, and 10% occurs in response to an unexpected breakdown.
6. Improved Safety
Another benefit of a successful O&M plan is increased safety. In every industry, keeping an environment safe with high clean standards should play an important role in facility management planning. If certain tasks such as fire alarm battery replacement, trash removal, health inspections, janitorial tasks, or other health and safety activities seem to fall through the cracks consistently, adding them to an operations and maintenance schedule will help prevent faults from happening. A clean and safe site creates a better work environment, efficiency and provides safety from liability costs.
WTS Energy provides staffing and if you are interested in maintaining the entire life cycle of your assets and fulfilling a project’s objectives and milestones, check out our Operations and Maintenance services.
