Prism software helps the maintenance team to manage their daily maintenance works more efficiently. First let us go thorough all types of maintenance works handled by then maintenance team. Then, we shall see how Prism enables the maintenance team be more productive.
Maintenance of all forms is inherently important for an organization to run its daily operations smoothly. There are many kinds of maintenance activities that may be required. This includes electrical maintenance, utility maintenance, water maintenance, sanitation, facility maintenance, and more. All of these maintenance aspects are vital and they must be adequately conducted for the successful progression of a facility. Electrical Maintenance highlights the importance of keeping an organization’s power working and functional, utility maintenance ensures that the organization’s machines are working, water maintenance ensures that the water provided at the facility is safe and usable, and sanitation ensures that the waste generated by a facility or a manufacturing plant is properly disposed of. These individual types of maintenance have their own procedures or steps that need to be followed.
Electrical Maintenance
Electrical Maintenance is important for the prevention of electrical breakdowns in a facility. A typical electrical maintenance check includes a review of power outlets, a review of electrical connections, Air conditioners, electromechanical machines, electrical board and circuit breakers, and monitoring of electrical damage. These appliances require more electricity to function and thus fall under electrical maintenance. Common electrical maintenance techniques include preventive electrical maintenance and corrective electrical maintenance.
Predictive Maintenance is when the electrician can conduct tests to see when a system would require maintenance. Examples of these tests include infrared tests, temperature analysis, and emission tests. Infrared Testing is used to determine heat loss or excessive cooling of a system. Similarly, temperature analysis is used to determine when a system is inefficient and overheating. All of these tests are used to predict when a machine is faulty and requires maintenance.
Some examples of components that an electrician works on include lighting, generators, and electrical safety lines. Lighting maintenance is simply ensuring that the lights in an area are energy-efficient. Older lights tend to consume a lot of energy compared to newer ones. To fix this, electricians perform a “group replacement”, which replaces the lights and the cables connecting the lights to ensure maximum energy efficiency. Generators or Inverters are backup power units in the event that the main power goes out. An electrician maintains this by ensuring that the automatic transfer switch is functional; this makes sure that the transition between main power and generator is seamless. Next, the electrician would need to check the coolant and oil levels of the generator. This is to ensure that the machine operates without friction, which may cause overheating and other problems. On a time-based maintenance spectrum, the electrician may need to change the spark plugs, oil, and coolant on an early basis. In all their services, electricians need to make sure that the machine's condition adheres to the electrical safety standards. Guidelines for this in the United States of America are given under OSHA and NFPA 70E guidelines for electrical safety. To prevent accidents, any machine falling outside the guidelines of these boards should be discontinued immediately.
Facility Maintenance
Facility maintenance is the development of the interior of a facility to increase the capital and commercial value of a building. A well-maintained facility would be able to look polished and not have any repairs. Thus, it is understandable that facility maintenance is largely situational. Larger facilities may need to invest more in facility maintenance rather than smaller facilities. A typical facility maintenance routine covers interior HVAC equipment, building systems, infrastructure, and surroundings. Examples of interior equipment of a facility are Heaters, Ventilators, Air Conditioners, Generators, and Air Compressors.
Examples of building systems include plumbing and fire suppression systems. It is important to ensure that building systems are functional because a nonfunctional system could cause a lot of damage. Thus, building systems are usually maintained and checked in a frequent time-based maintenance approach, as explained above. Infrastructure maintenance ensures that the windows and overall structure of a facility are safe and appealing. Another example would be ensuring the glass panes of a building are clean. Lastly, the surroundings of the facility also have to be maintained. This includes keeping the lawn of the facility well-cut and maintained and preventing any waste from entering the grounds.
Refer the article Effective Maintenance in Schools
Wastewater or Effluent water Maintenance
Water Maintenance is important for any facility that involves the usage of water. This is because when water is not treated, many chemicals from the water pipelines will also mix with the water causing it to be unhealthy and spread waterborne disease. Therefore, water maintenance should be of utmost importance for all organizations.
Wastewater or Effluent water Treatment in the industries primarily implements the following process: coagulation, flocculation, clarifier, aeration, filtration, and disinfection.
Refer to the article How Effluent Treatment Process (ETP) works?
Sanitation
Facilities also generate waste of all forms. Proper disposal and maintenance of this waste is called sanitation. There are 6 major methods of waste disposal, which are landfill, incineration, waste compacting, biogas generation, composting, and vermicomposting. Landfills are used for any form of waste that cannot be recycled. They are taken to a region and dumped under a layer of soil. This is the least environmentally friendly form of waste disposal. Incineration is burning the waste to reduce the amount of volume it occupies. This is done to ensure that landfills are able to handle larger amounts of waste. Waste Compaction is used in the process of recycling. Compacting cans and other items and then melting it makes the substance reusable for another purpose. Biogas generation applies to any organic waste that is generated by a facility. This organic waste can be used as fuel for some fungi and microorganisms. Lastly, composting and vermicomposting both involve decomposing waste for the formation of nutrient-rich soil. The only difference is that vermicomposting uses worms to speed the process. The work that the waste maintenance crew needs to do is to properly identify which form of waste disposal to use and to ensure that the form is carried out.
Mechanical Maintenance
Mechanical Maintenance plays an important role in facilities maintenance, overall. Mechanical Maintenance ensures that the equipment used in the utilities and production line is functioning. Taking the example of a food production plant, there are many machines including packing machines, spray washers, furnaces, and more. All these machines need to be maintained in a good condition in order for the production line to run continuously. An efficient mechanical maintenance team ensures that the machines are available for production, and helps the production team attain the desired production target.
Prism CMMS makes digital transformation easy for the asset maintenance team. Prism CMMS is a cloud-based, Mobile App based asset maintenance management software for the asset maintenance team.
Type of Maintenance activities
The maintenance team of any facility or manufacturing plant needs to follow the following type of maintenance activities.
Breakdown Maintenance or Reactive Maintenance
Preventive Maintenance or Scheduled Maintenance
Predictive Maintenance or Condition-based Maintenance
Breakdown Maintenance
This is more of a reactive approach. As and when equipment malfunctions or stops working, the maintenance team will have to react to the situation. If the maintenance team faces more breakdown maintenance works, it is not a good sign. It seriously affects the operational efficiency of the mechanical equipment. Turn around time to resolve the breakdown problem is very critical as it halts production.
Prism CMMS solution offers simple to use Mobile App for the maintenance and production team to handle the breakdown maintenance requests more efficiently without any time delay.
Preventive Maintenance
What is Preventive Maintenance?
Preventive Maintenance is performing a certain planned maintenance tasks on an equipment or a group of equipments in order to avoid any unexpected failure on the equipment in the future.
Key Performance Indicators of a maintenance team are based on how the preventive maintenance activities are planned wisely. The Maintenance Manager or Supervisor needs to create a maintenance plan based on the technician's workload and availability and the asset's availability for the maintenance window. The preventive maintenance work orders are classified based on their nature as daily/weekly/monthly or after every fixed number of days.
An example would be to replace air filters every two weeks, to check the lubrication level in a CNC machine on a daily basis.
Predictive Maintenance
What is Predictive Maintenance?
Predictive Maintenance is an advance method which uses some software tools and techniques to ascertain the condition of the equipment, alerts the maintenance team to plan the maintenance works, thereby avoids unexpected failure on the equipment in the future.
Prism software helps the maintenance team handle the predictive maintenance activities more wisely as Prism presents asset condition-related data to the users and alerts the maintenance team if any anomalies are found.
The maintenance team needs real-time health data about the assets in order to predict the maintenance activity. Now, predictive maintenance becomes easy with the help of IoT-based condition monitoring. The maintenance team gets notified by the IoT-based asset condition monitoring solution whenever an asset's condition starts deteriorating.
Prism software collects real-time health data from industrial assets like Air Compressors, CNC Machines, Robots, HVAC equipment, and Other Special Purpose Machines. To collect data from the industrial assets, Prism uses its IoT edge gateway Daaco-X deployed in the field. The Daaco-X IoT edge gateway supports various industry standard communication protocols like Modbus TCP/UDP/RTU, EtherNet/IP, BACnet/IP, Melsec, Siemens S7, and OMRON. Daaco-X collects the real-time data from sensors and controllers every second and sends it to Prism Central Server for further processing.
Refer to the articles related to Prism IIoT software:
Daaco-X IoT edge gateway performance benchmark