Performing timely maintenance is key for ensuring the continuing performance of your equipment. There are a variety of complementary maintenance strategies commonly used, such as predictive and proactive maintenance. One strategy that can help improve your efficiency is autonomous maintenance. In this blog, the LH Travis team takes a closer look at what this is, and the benefits it can provide.
What Is Autonomous Maintenance?
While it might sound like autonomous maintenance relies on something like a team of robots to perform maintenance, it’s actually much simpler than that. Instead, with autonomous maintenance, machine operators are trained to continuously monitor equipment and make adjustments and perform minor maintenance on the equipment in response.
This has a variety of benefits:
- By understanding the full scope of routine maintenance tasks, operators gain ownership of equipment and its surrounding area.
- It gets equipment to a like-new standard of clean and operational and keeps it there.
- It means skilled maintenance don’t have to worry about simple maintenance tasks and focus on more specialized work that requires their expertise
- It ensures issues are detected as they occur, ensuring they don’t progress to equipment failure.
How to Implement Autonomous Maintenance in Your Facility
Interested in implementing your own autonomous maintenance program? The exact requirements depend on your operation, but here’s a general idea of the process:
- Train operators on the ins and outs of their equipment, ensuring they understand how to detect and correct abnormalities, and set and maintain optimum equipment conditions.
- Perform an initial inspection and cleaning of equipment, returning it to a “like new” state by identifying and eliminating any signs of deterioration
- Eliminate causes of contamination and improve access, ensuring the machinery is cleaned and is easy to maintain.
- Perform ongoing inspection and monitoring, giving operators the chance to modify their maintenance routine to streamline the process.
- Standardize visual maintenance, doing things like identifying the flow of liquids through pipes and replacing opaque covers with transparent ones to make identifying issues easier.
- Improve continuously by periodically stepping back and assessing your processes to find any room for improvement.
Autonomous Maintenance Keeps Things Running Smoothly
With autonomous maintenance, your operators are empowered to identify and fix issues with equipment as it occurs, preventing failure and freeing up maintenance staff to focus on bigger jobs. Want more help improving efficiency and reliability of your equipment? Get in touch with us at LH Travis to speak to our experts.
