Why Maintenance Matters

#PMAM2022 #Maintenance #AssetManagement

Ashok Muthuswamy

Ashok Muthuswamy, Vice President- TQM & BE, TAFE Group speaks about the impact of maintenance on the key aspects of manufacturing

Maintenance is an extremely critical function when you look into all aspects of manufacturing including Production, Quality, Cost, Delivery, Safety, Morals – PQCDSM as the acronym stands for in the TPM lingo. Oftentimes, maintenance people are unsung heroes. They are responsible for critical work but somehow they always remain in the background and are away from the limelight. But that doesn’t take away their importance in any way. One point that I would like to emphasize is the focus of maintenance on safety – perhaps more than on productivity and cost. Couple of years ago, when most of the plants were restarted after being shut down for Covid, we heard about a lot of incidents where boilers were getting burst or reactors were going wrong and so on. This happened because the pre-start up procedures were not followed. To cut the long story short, maintenance is absolutely vital to avoid such scenarios from the safety standpoint. At the same time, if the better the equipment is maintained, the better the quality of the products would be. Of course, it would have an equally positive impact on productivity and delivery.

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