Facility Maintenance Management Software

Facilities form the non-core services of a corporation or any organization. Non-core services can include managing administration function, property management, and managing contract services such as cleaning and security. A major portion of the assets of an organization is in the form of infrastructure, like buildings and equipment. Hence, the maintenance of physical assets is a major function of facilities management.

The role of facilities management is to help businesses concentrate in their core competent areas. Facilities management takes on the role of providing routine, non-value-added services which are essential and important for the effective running of an organization.

Facilities management in its widest sense can be applied to any industries. The industries range from public services such as schools, universities and parks, to private services such as manufacturing. Anything that can be outsourced to a third party can be termed as facilities.

Since most of functions of facilities are routine, the role and capacity of IT is precisely suited for that function. IT provides end-to-end solutions for an enterprise. ERP and EAM systems take on the role of MRP systems to streamline operations and help reduce costs.

Physical assets such as buildings, equipment and IT installations require regular maintenance; therefore, the role of IT in providing maintenance solutions is a major part of the portfolio of ERP providers. Maintenance is a major function of facilities. According to a study, properly planned and maintained services can lead to a 20 percent reduction in the operating cost of a firm.

The level and scope of functionality varies in the maintenance management system, according to the type of industries and physical assets. Therefore, except for standard functions like maintenance audits and down-time calculators, most of the software functionalities should be customized.

These are many software vendors available, each of whom has an internet presence. The futuristic vision of maintenance management systems is already implemented by some vendors who provide on-demand remote maintenance services, thereby reducing the costs of installing of maintenance systems further.

Source: Eddie Tobey | ezinearticles

Maintenance Management: Contract Maintenance or Not? (Part 2 of 2)

This is the continue of the series Maintenance Management: Contract Maintenance or Not? ; what kind of maintenance you should or should not contract out and the reasons why, as well as the characteristics of a good maintenance contract.

INCENTIVES AND GOALS. If you consider outsourcing maintenance, I advise you to set up a contract that includes an incentive for the contractor to continuously perform better.

SERVICE. If your contract is based on buying service alone, there is no real incentive for the contractor to perform better. The more hours they sell, the more money they make, and they can sell more hours if your maintenance needs are reactive. Only the fear of losing the contract will motivate the contractor to perform better.

RELIABILITY. If your contract is based on delivering results, you can create a win-win situation for yourself and the contractor. In most mills, results should be in the following order of priority after safety and environmental issues:

1. Reliability of equipment.
2. Cost of delivering reliability.

If there is an incentive for a contractor to deliver reliability, it naturally follows an incentive to prevent maintenance and to perform preventive maintenance, plan maintenance, schedule maintenance, and so forth. In summary, they need a disciplined process in place and a good system to support it.

In selecting a contractor, I suggest that you not only look at their rates, but that you spend the most time evaluating their maintenance philosophy (if they have one), what reliability and maintenance process they will implement, and how they will measure results. Go into detail on the basics of how they would decide whether to prevent—or not prevent—component failures, how planning will be done, how scheduling will be done, which key performance indicators will be used, continuous training of their people, and so forth. This is important, because you must remember that the only thing a contractor can do differently than you is that they can implement a more efficient work system. They can often do this quickly, or at least they can promise to do it quickly. Seldom will a contractor bring in a crew with superior skills to your own.

LONG-TERM CONTRACTS. A maintenance contract should be long term—no less than five years and preferably longer than that. There are many reasons for this. Two of them are included in what Dr. Deming called the seven deadly diseases common to U.S. management. They are “Lack of constancy of purpose” and “Mobility of top management.” My observation is that one phenomenon leads to the other. New managers are called in for fast and, unfortunately, often temporary results. They often change the organization, perhaps only because they want to bring in their buddies, make some cut backs, and then move on to another place before the long-term effects are noticed. The front line of the organization, where the actual actions of new directives have to take place, sees this as a constant change of direction. They start talking about the program of the month and, consequently, they do not change anything and the results of management efforts will be absent.

If this goes on for some time, no sustainable results will be achieved. In this situation, I think a long-term maintenance contract offers a possible solution. The contract has to be founded on the right principles and work processes, because, when these are not changed for a long period of time, your contractor can help eliminate the “lack-of-constancy-of-purpose phenomenon.” With good leadership, the work processes and your results should continuously improve. It could be done without a contractor, but not in a system where a new mill manager or maintenance manager means a new program.

HEALTHY COMPETITION. Almost without exception, maintenance departments have never had true competition. They have monopoly on most work in the mill. A contractor should be seen as a competitor to your own organization. As long as you are competitive, outsourcing of maintenance is not a valid alternative.

Maintenance Management: Contract Maintenance or Not? (Part 1 of 2)

This series article is from the Reliability and Maintenance Management Consultant Idhammar, who is also the president of IDCON, Raleigh, NC, a reliability and maintenance management consulting firm, specializing in education, training and implementation of improved operations, reliability, and maintenance management practices.

Think what he tells about whether we need a contract maintenance or not. This is what he think of contract, or outsourcing, of maintenance. In this article he elaborated on what kind of maintenance should or should not be contracted out and the reasons for choosing either option.

Variability in workload. The better you manage the workload of your own resources, the less need you will have for contract maintenance. In weekly and daily maintenance activities, your workload should not vary much if you have disciplined priorities and a good preventive maintenance system in place. Even areas such as maintenance workshops and scaffolding services should experience very few urgent requests, which justifies keeping only a minimum crew, if any at all, for such services in-house.

Large variations in workload will lead to poor utilization of resources and overstaffing. This often leads to discussions about contract maintenance. However, contracting maintenance resources will not change anything. The contractor must provide a better system for people to work in. Otherwise, they will not be more effective than your existing system. If this is the case, you must ask yourself why you cannot improve the system yourself when the contractor can.

The answer may be that you have tried many times without sustainable success. Your organization might be in gridlock because of politics, ingrained union practices, and so on. A situation like this can lead to an “act of desperation.” In other words, your organization has lost its power and ability to improve as fast as a contractor can (or at least promises to), so this becomes the reason why your maintenance is contracted out.

Temporary scheduled increase in workload.
During scheduled shutdowns and major outages, it is natural that you contract out work. It can be very cost-effective to not only contract the resources for executing the work, but to also have them plan and schedule major outages. However, periodic shutdowns—for example, every five to seven weeks—of a paper machine can, most probably, be managed better by your own shutdown planners.

Core business philosophy. Contract maintenance suppliers often argue, as a selling point, that maintenance is not a core business. Well, if you are a pulp and paper mill, or any other manufacturing plant, I would like to challenge that statement.

Why would maintenance not be a core business, while operations and manufacturing are considered core businesses? In fact, I believe that one of the best ways of approaching outsourcing is to have a manufacturing contract that is not limited to maintenance alone.

In looking at maintenance contracts alone, you should look upon “equipment reliability tasks” as a core business. You can always question if it makes good business sense to have your own carpenters, painters, people for scaffolding, masons, tinsmiths, and blacksmiths. Having the resources a phone call away and no invoice to explain will lead to more use of these resources than is needed. I sometimes wonder how many unnecessary paint jobs—and bookshelves, tables, and other carpentry work—have been done just because the resources were available and the requestor of the work did not need to pay the full cost of it.

Equipment reliability is the result of maintenance work, and it includes such essential elements as maintenance prevention, including lubrication, filtration, alignment, cleaning, and operating practices. It also includes preventive maintenance activities such as vibration analysis, basic inspections, and so forth. I believe all equipment reliability activities should be performed with in-house resources, unless you contract out all maintenance on an equipment reliability performance and cost basis.

Lack of skills. If your organization does not frequently use certain special skills, it is necessary to contract for these skills. Even if you train your own people in specialty skills, they cannot maintain them because they do not use them frequently enough.

The present and the future shortage of skilled craftspeople, especially in the U.S. pulp and paper industry, might be one of the best sales arguments for maintenance contract suppliers—if they have these resources to offer. Also, it is not unheard for unions to hold back their own members from receiving training. This fact has never made sense to me, since it should be in their interest to support training of members so that they are competitive with contractors.

Preventive Maintenance: Replacing Incandescent Lamps with LEDS

Currently, there is interest in high efficiency, long-life, light emitting diode (LED) lamps for use in factories, institutional, and commercial applications, because the costs of electricity for lighting and labor for bulb replacement are significant. The goal of the LED manufacturers is to build a very high-brightness white LED that is economical and efficient enough to be used for illumination. To gain widespread acceptance as a legitimate light source for general lighting, LEDs must be able to economically and reliably deliver illumination levels of white light of a quality within today's acceptable standards.

Theory of operation

An LED is a PN junction semiconductor that emits photons when forward biased. The emission of light occurs when minority carriers recombine with carriers of the opposite type in the band gap of the diode. The wavelength of the emitted light — which determines its color — varies according to the semiconductor material.

LEDs are processed in wafer form similar to silicon integrated circuits, and broken out into dice. The simplest packaged LED is the indicator lamp. Typically, LEDs have a mean time between failures (MTBF) of more than 100,000 hr.

Today's ultrabright LEDs exceed the light output of incandescent and halogen lamps. They don't have the maintenance requirements associated with filament lamps. LEDs can be dimmed using a pulse-width modulation (PWM) circuit, which delivers energy in pulses of varying duty cycle.

History of LEDs

The first reports of a device with properties similar to LEDs dates back to 1906 when Henry Round reported electroluminescence while experimenting with carborundum. However, LEDs didn't become commercially available until the early 1960s. Texas Instruments sold an infrared (IR) device for $130 and GE distributed red LEDs through the Allied Radio catalog for $260. They were expensive and sold in low volumes.

IBM used LEDs as on-off indicator lights on circuit boards in a mainframe computer constructed around 1964, which marks the first time LEDs were used to replace incandescent lamps. LEDs used less power, could be mounted directly on the circuit board, and had a much longer life expectancy, which made using LEDs attractive from a maintenance perspective.

In the mid 1980s, the U.S. military began gradually replacing tungsten filament indicators with LEDs, and they began appearing in elevator cars. As with the IBM application, LEDs were designed into pieces of equipment. They were mounted on printed circuit boards (PCBs), mounted in equipment panels and face plates using specific mounting bezels with wires soldered to their leads, and plugged into sockets made specifically for LEDs.

LED performance made a leap in the early 2000s. Companies started manufacturing flashlights using LEDs instead of the traditional incandescent bulb. As improvements were made in brightness and color, LEDs moved farther into tungsten territory. They appeared in traffic signals, home entertainment, and decorative lighting.

Today, LEDs are used in many industries from automotive to architectural lighting applications. Industrial plants are discovering the benefits of replacing traditional bulbs with LED lamps. For example, hundreds of incandescent lamp part numbers now have direct LED-based replacements. Most LED suppliers have extensive cross-reference literature and databases. Standard lamp bases are available, allowing LED lamps to replace incandescent lamps without having to retrofit equipment.

Flashlights continue to get brighter. Some currently available flashlights suitable for industrial use boast as much as 1800 foot-candles (fc) of white light. LED floodlights, work lights, and luminaires for general-purpose lighting applications are available as well.

Benefits

LEDs have enjoyed continued success because they use considerably less power and last much longer than tungsten filament incandescent bulbs. LED lamps use only 10% to 20% of the energy consumed by equivalent incandescent lamps. An average LED life span can exceed 100,000 hr — more than 11 yr.

LEDs are solid-state devices, which make them virtually immune to electrical and mechanical shock — unlike incandescent lamps, which have filaments that are very susceptible to electrical and mechanical shock. Electrical shock comes from constant on-off transitions, transients, and surges; mechanical shock comes from bumping, jarring, and other forms of vibration. Also, LEDs produce very little heat, making them an attractive alternative to incandescent lamps in applications where heat is an issue, such as biotechnology, chemical, and food processing.

Issues

LEDs had to overcome physical and technological issues to get where they are today. The primary hurdles have been drive current, packaging, color, and price. Although these issues have been addressed, they still exist to some degree. Drive current directly affects LED lamp output and lamp life. LEDs are inherently robust. They are capable of delivering high output at high current, as long as heat is extracted properly.

Packaging issues include thermal management, current handling capability, and color. Advanced device packaging allows adequate heat dissipation and increased current capacity. Packaging also affects color, which is extremely important in applications that require white light. Use of LEDs as illumination sources requires white light with a degree of "warmth." This requirement must be met if LEDs are to make any headway in replacing incandescent lamps for general-purpose illumination. Fluorescent lighting addressed this issue. And it appears that LEDs are rising to meet the challenge as well.

The cost-effectiveness of LEDs depends on the application. Today, the system price is high for replacing conventional incandescent lamps with LED-based technology. However, for established LED applications, such as control panel indicators and annunciator lamps, LEDs are more cost effective. Although the unit price is higher, the lower power consumption and longer lamp life help offset the initial purchase price. Some plants can justify the higher cost of LEDs for this application based on lower maintenance costs alone.

Source: Plant Engineering Magazine - January 1, 2005