What does the Maintenance management module do?
The Maintenance management module helps you plan and record maintenance activities on your machines, fixed assets and capital tooling.
Key features
- Maintains an asset register.
- Maintains a planned maintenance schedule for each asset.
- Allows authorised personnel to request maintenance following a breakdown.
- Automatically raises maintenance tickets for planned maintenance tasks.
- Maintains information for fitters and sub-contract maintenance organisations.
- Provides tools for the maintenance manager to allocate tasks to fitters.
- Records fitter activities against each maintenance ticket.
- Records spares usages against each maintenance ticket.
Is it suitable for my business?
The Maintenance management module has been designed for the type of company which will use other modules of the Rhombus Factory Information System. It is designed to support maintenance activities on your own plant and equipment. It is not designed to support a service department which provides support and maintenance to users of your company's products.
Asset register
The asset register records all machines, fixed assets and capital tools which may require maintenance. You can collect assets into groups for reporting purposes.
Fitters
A fitter is an employee or sub-contractor who carries out maintenance tasks. Sub-contractors are set up as suppliers and then marked as being a fitter as well.
Maintenance tickets
The maintenance system is based around maintenance tickets. A maintenance ticket is a request for a maintenance task to be carried out on a particular asset. A maintenance ticket may be raised by a supervisor or machine operator when a machine breaks down, or raised automatically by the planned maintenance scheduler. Each maintenance ticket has a unique number and its status can be viewed at any time. There is a user definable priority system which allows breakdowns which have stopped production to get priority. Free text can be attached to a ticket to describe the problem which needs attention. The system allows a maintenance supervisor to allocate fitters to outstanding maintenance tickets. More than one fitter can be allocated to the same ticket, either because more than one fitter is required to do the job, or because it will last more than one shift. When a fitter has finished a ticket, or stopped work on it because he is waiting for parts, he can see a list of tickets which he has been allocated in priority order.
The system will create purchase orders for maintenance tickets allocated to a sub-contractor.
Fitter booking
When a fitter starts work on a maintenance ticket he books onto that ticket using his bar-coded badge. He may complete the work without interruption, or he may have to wait for parts, or move to a higher priority ticket. When he stops work on a ticket he must book it as complete, suspended or waiting parts. A fitter is only allowed to be booked onto one ticket at time, and this rule is enforced by the system. When a fitter completes a ticket he can enter a free text description of the actual problem and what he had to to do fix it.
Spare parts usage
If you are using the Stock control module, you can record your stocks of spare parts and the maintenance tickets on which they are used.
You can use the Purchase order processing module to purchase spare parts.
Planned maintenance
The maintenance manager can set up template maintenance tickets which describe regular planned maintenance tasks. These are associated with the assets to which they apply. The planned maintenance scheduler automatically raises live maintenance tickets from the templates when the tasks fall due. These tickets are allocated to a fitter and recorded in the usual way.
Complicated maintenance tasks such as an annual service can be broken down into sub-tasks. Our customers often define sub-tasks according to the trade required to perform them. The sub-tasks can be opened and closed independently, thus allowing you to complete a service over a number of days. Only when all the sub-tasks are closed does FIS close the parent ticket, and schedule the next instance of this task.
If you are using the Machine monitoring module, planned maintenance tasks can be scheduled based on hours run or number of cycles, as well as elapsed time. Downtime data from the Machine monitoring module including MTBF calculations are used to help decide planned maintenance intervals.
Reports
The module provides reports of maintenance tickets by asset and by fitter. You can see the hours worked and spares used on an asset during any period. You can see the hours worked and the idle hours of your fitters during any period. The system calculates MTBF and availability statistics for each asset. Supervisors can see the current activity of each fitter and the priority of the task on which he is working. The system produces reports of how well you have been able to adhere to your planned maintenance schedule for each asset.