ERIKS: Reducing motor maintenance costs

ERIKS report highlights five important aspects of adopting an asset management approach to motor maintenance:

1. Reducing overall number of repairs

ERIKS look at the customer’s historical information concerning the type and number of units sent out for repair. These are reviewed and based on our experience we agree targets with the customer to reduce these overall numbers. This can be done, for example, through failure mode analysis to determine what is causing the customers equipment to fail.

2. Changing the profile of repairs

Once identified, we can instigate with the customer, the necessary maintenance regimes, monitoring techniques and corrective actions needed to reduce future unplanned failures.

3. Reducing the number of unplanned ’emergency’ repairs

We also need to move from the costly, catastrophic breakdown failures to planned routine overhauls. These overhauls can be scheduled from condition monitoring surveys, mean time between failure and recommended / best practice maintenance. Whichever system is used the ethos is the same, the overhauls are planned and completed at the most convenient and practical time to the customers process, thus keeping downtime of the equipment to a minimum

4. Carry out effective predictive and preventative maintenance

Customers can apply all forms of good maintenance practices including Reliability Centred Maintenance, Total Production Maintenance, Kaizen, Continuous Improvement Teams, Crosby and Condition Based Maintenance. This requires total commitment from the operators through to the managing director. The success of a good maintenance regime can be measured in the change in failure mode of machines over time.

5. The role of condition monitoring

One definition of condition monitoring is, “The collection, storage, comparison, and evaluation of data taken from a machine to establish the running condition of that machine.” The data could be made up of several parameters. For example, looseness/play due to mechanical wear, electric current, pressure, surface finish brush wear, vibration and temperature, to name a few.

A database needs to be initialised, itemising the data to be collected from the individual components of a machine and what frequency that data needs to be taken. The frequency of the data acquisition is dependant upon several factors.
* Criticality of machine to production - cost of downtime
* Cost of damage to machine from individual component failure
* Time to repair or replace component
* Criticality of component within the machine
* The failure mode, failure rate and time between failures
* The maintenance needed on the item and its frequency and method of maintenance
* Access to specialised data acquisition equipment
* Access to machinery

This data is then evaluated against known set limits for that machine, based on international standards, manufacturers guidelines or previous repairs on that machine or similar machines.