Question

If a production machine is working 24/7 during a one week period, and requires 10 hours of preventive maintenance per week. How should those 10 hours be scheduled? Please analyze considering reliability of the machine, availability of the machine, as well as production output. Please explain your reasoning.

Answer 1

You’ve always had access to the equipment on the weekends. Now you have to redistribute how you’ll handle that maintenance.”

And suddenly you have another conflicting factor. The maintenance employees are usually the most senior people who’ve bid into the higher-paying jobs that maintenance offers. They are accustomed to working day shifts. Most companies retain the core of their maintenance function on the day shift and assign a skeleton crew to tackle the fringes of the full 24/7 schedule — in case of emergencies.

“If you expect to go 24/7, you must have enough extra equipment around to do decent maintenance on your main line equipment,” says Bob Nelson, vice president operations at this Cooper plant. “Our lift truck fleet grew by 15 percent. We have staged component assembles for our conveyors that we can swap out in a matter of minutes. There are no weekends for catch-up in a 24/7 operation, so you have to learn to do a whole lot more planning. If you’re as capital intensive as we are in the tire business, you won’t be competitive in the world if you allow factories to sit idle 35 percent of the time.”

pointers

If your facility was originally designed for a five-day work week, converting it for seven-day operation requires considerable work. After living through it himself, Tom Henderson offers the following advice:

• Remember your utilities. A 5-day-a-week operation can deal with a minor gasket leak by taking the whole steam line down over the weekend. A 24/7 operation must be gridded in zones so you can isolate any problem.

• Go modular. Even if it’s more cost-effective up front to put in a 300-foot stretch of conveyor, consider installing three 100-foot sections. Again, isolating the problem makes this more cost-effective in the long run. Cooper stocks complete head roll assemblies for its conveyors, with pre-installed bearings and integrated side frames.