Plant Maintenance

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The Plant Maintenance (PM) module helps you plan and control both preventative maintenance and repair of your production facilities and equipment. If your requirements vary from job to job (from planned retooling to emergency repairs , for example), you can use many of the tools in some cases and fewer in others.

TIP

Help with Plant Maintenance

For help on Plant Maintenance, choose Help, Help Library, Plant Maintenance. Be advised, however, that when the Help files refer to technical objects, they mean pieces of equipment or a plant location.

You must understand two key concepts to learn how the technical information about your plant is structured:

Functional location ”

The place in your process where equipment is installed. Two examples of functional locations in Figure B.3 are Number 2 Steam Plant Boiler Feedwater Pump and Number 2 Boiler Gas Burner. A functional location can have many pieces of equipment installed.
Equipment ”A physical piece of machinery purchased on a certain date with specific warranty information and a serial number. An example of this is the 500 HP GE 3 phase motor, serial #57200857, bought in September 1989. (Equipment can be moved between similar functional locations or be kept in inventory as spare.) Equipment can be made up of several other pieces of equipment.

Figure B.3. This is one way the locations and equipment in your plant might be structured. Again, your plant may be set up differently.

Figure B.4 shows a typical workflow for one way that PM could deal with an equipment breakdown. Your workflow might vary, depending on your plant and the urgency of the repair.

Figure B.4. A typical flow for Preventative Maintenance.

Some general PM information:

The main documents necessary for PM are maintenance notification (which notes that something is broken) and maintenance order (which says "Go fix this").
The main master files involved are Functional Location, Equipment Master, and Bill of Materials.
PM can communicate to MM to take material from stock. It can also contact Human Resources for timekeeping and Controlling for charge information.
Using functional location and equipment helps you find causes for problems. For example, it can highlight if a particular functional location is a problem area, or if equipment from a certain vendor is giving you trouble.
You can assign maintenance tasks to both internal and external groups.
To really leverage your information in PM, you need to have the people who repaired the equipment (the tradespeople) record their technical findings. These include such items as component damaged, kind of damage, cause of damage, and actions taken to correct.

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