New goal for equipment maintenance – increasing profits

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It is a very bad thing when production equipment stops working due to a malfunction, as this will cause huge losses to the company. Timely equipment maintenance can help avoid such unexpected losses, but how often should preventive maintenance be carried out? In principle, each company should decide on its own the schedule for equipment maintenance. However, different companies within the same industry may have entirely different experiences in equipment maintenance, and their approaches also vary. But who could have more experience than a professional equipment maintenance company? Professional equipment maintenance companies offer higher efficiency, greater flexibility and adaptability, as well as superior quality in equipment maintenance. Their earnings from labor work are also highly enviable: the annual earnings from labor work alone in Germany amount to 250 billion euros. Mr. Harald Neuhaus of the FVI Equipment Maintenance Association estimates that European companies spend around 1.5 trillion euros per year on equipment maintenance, of which 40% is used for maintenance materials and 60% covers labor costs. In Europe, the number of people directly involved in the maintenance of industrial equipment is estimated to be around 10 million, while those indirectly involved in such maintenance amounts to about 30 million. Equipment maintenance: A market in growth. What drives the growth of the equipment maintenance market? The answer is: on the one hand, manufacturing companies focus their efforts on their key tasks, and their capabilities for equipment maintenance and repair are limited (in other words, they lack the necessary experience in equipment maintenance) ； On the other hand, the service quotes from professional equipment maintenance companies are just right: a comprehensive equipment maintenance plan not only helps to reduce a company’s maintenance costs but also facilitates the modernization and upgrading of production equipment, enabling manufacturing firms to make full use of their existing resources. Equipment maintenance has become a very important industry. Equipment maintenance companies do not see themselves as outsiders; rather, they consider themselves to be \"participants\" in resolving equipment failures in businesses. The reason for this is: 1. Fierce international competition has sparked the concept of \"high speed and high efficiency\" in various fields. 2. The technical complexity of production is increasing, which in turn raises the value of production equipment; mastering and using such equipment requires an increasingly broad range of knowledge. 3. The service life of equipment is getting longer and longer. High equipment investments must be recouped as soon as possible, while increasingly complex product supply chains and shrinking inventory levels require just-in-time production and supply methods. This also exposes manufacturing enterprises to extremely high financial risks in the event of equipment failures. 4. **Both the legal department and other relevant parties have imposed increasingly strict requirements regarding environmental protection as well as occupational safety. For the aforementioned reasons, the maintenance of production equipment has shifted from fixing faults on-site to preventing them in advance, while also carrying the responsibility of protecting the environment and the safety of workers. Therefore, the scope of work has expanded from ensuring the proper operation of equipment to safeguarding the production process as well. In the past, people also talked about preventive or fault-correction equipment maintenance; nowadays, what is often discussed is risk-based maintenance. Modern equipment maintenance professionals are concerned not only with the risks during the production process (equipment downtime due to component wear) and technical risks (downtime caused by technical issues), but also more importantly with environmental pollution resulting from equipment failures and the personal safety of those who operate the equipment. The equipment maintenance manual describes such risks and the probability of their occurrence, outlines the economic losses that these risks may cause to the company, and clearly specifies the corresponding countermeasures. Unlike traditional risk solutions that focus on calculating risks, estimating the costs of risk losses, and proposing risk control measures, the new whole-process risk management approach, abbreviated as “TPM”, aims to offset or compensate for various types of losses, and to make full and efficient use of the potential of production equipment, workers, raw materials, and energy. In other words, TPM represents the ideal scenario, with zero losses. Using TPM should achieve “zero losses,” “zero quality defects,” and “zero work-related accidents.” The ultimate result is: 100% high-quality products, with the production equipment always in optimal working condition. In summary, considering that equipment maintenance is an important cost factor, it makes the maintenance of production equipment a crucial aspect of corporate management. Knowledge related to equipment maintenance thus becomes a key element in optimizing the production process and managing resources. In the past, equipment maintenance was aimed at reducing losses. Now, equipment maintenance is aimed at increasing profits.