How Life Cycle Management Can Mitigate Plant Issues

Manufacturing plants face production maintenance challenges daily, as a fact of life. 

Chris Evans, Strategic Development Manager at Mitsubishi Electric Automation Systems, believes adopting a life cycle management strategy can mitigate these issues and deliver increased production quality and sustainable plant performance.

He argues a shift in perspective is needed across the supply chain, where manufacturing plant stakeholders and suppliers work together across equipment and plant lifecycles.

What role do people play in this approach?

It would be easy to simply deploy intelligent digitalisation techniques, such as predictive maintenance, to solve these problems. While this should undoubtedly be the long-term goal, let’s not lose sight of the fundamentals of maintenance – the day-to-day task of maintaining critical plant assets and minimising production downtime.

This will always continue to involve people – highly skilled, multi-disciplined maintenance staff with a deep knowledge of the production plant, who are usually seen as the cavalry who ‘get us going again’. The challenge facing many manufacturing plants stems from economic pressure over recent years, where maintenance teams have tended to be downsized. 

As such, retaining key personnel has been a challenge. Even more difficult has been replacing people with an equal skill set and the experience to hit the ground running. This lack of retained skilled maintenance people increases the likelihood of unwanted downtime and puts continuous production at risk.

How do you address the issue of obsolescence with legacy automation equipment?

It is critical to understand the plant automation landscape because obsolescence poses a significant risk to production. It is often the case that there is a lack of awareness that the problem exists at all.

’The plant keeps going and we have some spare parts in the stores’ is a well-worn rallying cry. Whatever level of obsolescence exists on plant, this will continue to exist due to the reliability and longevity of most automation platforms. In turn, this will eventually lead to higher costs, significant downtime and production losses.

When equipment becomes obsolete, spare parts become increasingly difficult to get hold of and, if you can get them, you pay a significant premium to purchase them. So, when the last spare part has been used from the stores and cannot be found via the internet – or only with the risk of it coming from an unauthorised source with no warranty and no guarantee it will actually work – serious problems may arise. The way out of this is to adopt a legacy migration strategy long before reaching this critical stage.

What is your advice on developing a spare parts inventory management strategy? 

Production plant stakeholders should consider multiple initial questions when developing an effective spare parts inventory management strategy. Foremost among these is whether they have enough spares on-site and that they are the right spares profile.

From here, further questions can be asked over whether a test interval is required for these spare parts and, importantly, whether they will work if needed. Clearly, availability and accessibility of correct working spare parts is critical should something fail on a plant.

However, holding spare parts is costly and managing the inventory can pose even bigger challenges. Are records up to date? Do parts get replenished when used? These are questions that must be addressed.

What’s the way forward?

Maintaining a production plant requires significant investment in trained personnel and an extensive spare parts inventory. At a time when business costs are rising, leveraging the expertise of the supply chain to develop and adopt a life cycle management strategy can help mitigate these pressures. 

This strategy will help increase the efficiency of a maintenance team by offering extra added value services outside the scope of what they have the capacity to deliver.  By doing so, production plant decision makers can better navigate and adapt to today’s maintenance challenges.

To read the full article in the magazine, click HERE.

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