Many businesses conduct an annual workplace maintenance shutdown to carry out the necessary maintenance activities that normally cannot be performed normally during day-to-day tasks.
It may be slightly costly and put a temporary stop to business operations – but it’s still pretty rewarding when you consider the lower energy use, lesser overtime for your maintenance staff, improved plant efficiency and operations, reduced unplanned downtime, and lesser unexpected mechanical failures.
So, what is it that you have to do when it’s time for shutdown maintenance – regardless of whether it’s your first time or not?
Read on, and we’ll show you the five different phases you have to keep in mind!
Scoping
Gather your team and start devising a thorough plan of what to accomplishing during or before the shutdown maintenance occurs.
It’s important you get every single thing down from the very start, so the shutdown maintenance runs smoothly. That means coming up with a strategy that targets a different area of your operation – be it testing, replacing to repairing.
For instance, is your distribution transformer experiencing any problems? Then you may want to consider a distribution transformer repair so you can get the issue fixed and proceed with the usual business operations.
At the same time, you should also put aside some time to study past industry case studies and preventive maintenance projects so you can learn how other businesses lower their costs and improve their overall equipment effectiveness. Here’s probably where the scope of the project and key performance indicators (KPIs) are used to calculate performance.
Preparation
This is where everything falls into place – all the said plans and ideas are actually getting ready to take off.
Several supplemental plans include storage protection, logistic plans, environmental, health and safety plans, quality assurance and quality control plans.
Inform your maintenance and support staff so the shutdown procedure can be gone through once more. Ensure that everyone knows what their role is – and whether any interchanging of roles is required. It’s probably best to make a detailed list of all personnel with the most recent contact information – so everyone stays contactable in case of an urgent call or task.
Scheduling
What you want to do at this point is to keep the shutdown as short as possible – so you can resume regular business operations immediately.
More importantly, all the tasks that are being handled are those that can only be performed during shutdown – leave other activities aside and manage them only when the shutdown maintenance is completed.
Just keep in mind that even with a comprehensive schedule – it may not necessarily follow every part of it. Certain unplanned work or tasks may still occur – so you will need to keep yourself prepared for that. One way is by building a contingency plan so that any unforeseen incidents will not derail your shutdown maintenance.
Execution
Your shutdown team, alongside your assigned engineer, will thoroughly inspect the equipment within the compound.
Also, be sure to measure the schedule, budget and scope changes then against KPIs put in place during the scoping phase.
Any identified equipment thought to have potential faults will be looked through once more – then the engineer will decide if any action is necessary. If not, equipment servicing like a detailed examination can be done – such as a generator or electric motor overhauling.
Afterwards, the maintenance team and your engineer will finalise any other repairs and leave the rest to your staff – they’ll start to set up the equipment get ready for regular operations.
Evaluation
Last but not least, put together a post-shutdown meeting to review the procedure and evaluate the performance of each undergone task.
Document all of the events and tasks which occurred during the shutdown maintenance and be open to any sort of improvement measures. Such examples include costs, KPIs, shutdown to start-up and ramp-up, and so forth.
Then, all you have to do next is put together a final report with all the summarised successes and problems – so you have every phase of the shutdown jotted down. This will help improve any future preventive maintenance.
With a clear idea of these five phases, you can ensure your next shutdown maintenance runs smoothly – even obtaining informative knowledge for future improvements.
