Prevent now or pay more later

When laundries need to cut costs, they may decide to cutback on preventative maintenance, feeling this will have few adverse effects. This can be a short term view that indicates a lack of understanding of contribution that preventative maintenance can make to the business.

A good management will have an overview of how the business works and can explain this to the rest of the organisation.

In the laundry industry the management will usually have four goals.

• Providing a service for cleaning and finishing linen and garments.

• Making sure that the way the service is provided keeps the customer happy.

• Reducing operating costs by minimising waste and preventing losses. This includes avoiding wasting utilities, minimising product losses and correcting service defects.

• Continuously improving the processes and product quality and making optimum use of people and equipment. This helps businesses to survive competition.

To achieve these goals the management monitors the business keeping alert for changes in performance or conditions to minimise their impact. The management decides what changes are needed and decides the strategies to pursue.

Those responsible for production and operations decide how the equipment should be maintained. Should machines always be kept in peak condition or should they be allowed to run with little or no servicing until they breakdown?

Production and operations managers decide when to schedule shutdowns for overhauling and refurbishing the equipment.

The maintenance department supports production and operations managers. Its main functions include equipment design, construction, installation and maintenance. The department modifies and modernises the company’s equipment and physical assets.

Maintenance staff are also responsible for keeping the utilities, “ the lifeblood” of the laundry, working. Laundries need both external utilities such as electricity, gas, water, phone, internet, sewage and waste disposal and internal utilities such as hot water, tempered water, water softener, steam and compressed air and heating, ventilation and air conditioning. The external utilities will be maintained by the provider’s staff but the laundry’s engineering department will look after the equipment that generates the internal utilities.

In-house staff may also look after areas such as IT networks that are critical to the business.

Maintenance staff will also be responsible for keeping production equipment running and the skills needed to do so range from basic mechanical skills to the technical expertise involved in servicing computer networked control systems with electronic feedback.

Finding and hiring skilled maintenance personnel is difficult and most plants don’t have a fully skilled maintenance team.

However a lack of skills often accounts for the equipment problems that keep recurring. I estimate that 20% of the equipment can cause 80% of the problems and the cost of these recurring problems can be staggering. Such problems may be avoided by training staff so they keep up-to-date with the necessary skills. Management sometimes ask: ”What happens if we train staff and they leave?” “My answer is “ What happens if untrained staff stay?”

Training keeps people from becoming frustrated and stressed when they don’t know how to do a task correctly.

Ensuring workers feel competent makes them work better and keeps them motivated.

Training also helps identify which failures are caused by:

• Equipment design.

• Equipment condition.

• Poor operating practices.

• Poor maintenance practices.

• Lack of training.

The number of training days per year that each member of the maintenance team receives is an indication of a management’s commitment to improving the business and developing its employees. “What percentage of the payroll is budgeted for training, excluding training needed to comply with regulations?” Remember the business that does not pay for maintenance may have to pay more later.

Increasingly laundries are looking at the lifetime costs of equipment rather than just the purchase price, shipping and installation charges.

During difficult economic times refurbishing a piece of machinery may make more sense than replacing it.

The lowest purchase price is not always the best choice. Consider the energy costs and efficiency of an air compressor.

Electricity will account for 75% of its costs over its lifetime. The other 25% is split between the purchase price and maintenance costs.

Purchasing energy efficient equipment may cost more initially but will reduce the costs incurred during its lifetime.

Additional lifetime equipment costs to consider are start-up, maintenance, serviceability, user training, upgrades and the eventual cost of decommissioning the equipment when it is no longer viable.

Checking on performance

The secret of managing a maintenance department successfully lies in the motto: Prior Proper Planning Prevents Poor Performance.

The essentials for managing work and the labour force effectively are:

• Establishing key performance indicators.

• Making a weekly plan.

• Setting a daily schedule.

• Planning the order for carrying out the set work.

• Keeping written notes of procedures for staff reference.

Key Performance Indicators (KPI) are the details – reports, data, figures – that show how the business is faring. These details are essential for good management. To plan for the future, businesses need to know what is happening now and what has happened in the past.

The smell, sight and touch of the washed and finished linen is a good indicator of the laundry quality.

Smell the linen closeup. Look at the whites to see if they are bright or have grey tones. Does the linen look wrinkled? Does it feel soft or is it harsh?

Visiting the maintenance department regularly on Monday will give an indicator of how well it is being managed and how well the staff are working. Are work benches and the floors clean? Are the tools that are not in use kept stored neatly? Has the waste bin been emptied? Negative replies could indicate that plant and machinery are also being poorly maintained. They could indicate that the department does not plan in its work but instead simply answers calls for service as and when they come in.

Maintenance tasks should be assigned according to the urgency and the department manager should work with the production manager to set a list of priorities for the week.

Maintenance needs to be planned in advance and the plan should also include a schedule for assigning staff, making sure that the materials and tools for each job are available. Each job should have a written work order that records the equipment ID, the date and time and the downtime involved. After the task has been carried out, the order should include extra details such as the component that failed and why.

Managers need to ask: “Could the failure have been prevented and was the problem resolved?”

Recording such detail will help to build up a history for each laundry machine.

Setting procedures

Keeping written records of the procedures for each task helps to keep high performance standards.

These written procedures are a great help when regular staff are off sick or on holiday and when new staff join the team.

Such records can include procedures for opening the laundry and turning on internal utilities and just as importantly precise instructions for shutting down equipment and utilities and locking the building.

There should also be instructions for each maintenance task on a machine and on operating the equipment. Maintenance tasks can be defined as reactive, preventative or predictive.

Reactive maintenance is unplanned and therefore expensive in terms of repair and of its effects on production. It needs to be kept to a minimum. Preventative and predictive maintenance can both help to do this.

Preventative maintenance refers to tasks carried out on a scheduled basis, daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or annually so they can be planned for a time when they will cause the least disruption. It also involves keeping regular checks on the machines and on finished work – listening, looking, sniffing and touching the linen to recognise the warning signs that equipment could need attention in the near future.

Predictive maintenance: Machine failures do not occur at set intervals and often happen at the most inconvenient time.

So managers need to spot the warning signs at the earliest possible moment, before they can even be detected by the senses. Technology can help here. Infrared imaging can “see” changes in heat. Ultrasonic detectors can “hear” friction and turbulence and vibration analysers sense imbalance, misalignment or bearing faults.

Predictive maintenance also involves analysing the maintenance schedules to see which tasks on the list are actually necessary. Investigation often find that 20% of scheduled tasks are unnecessary and may even cause problems.

As an example, oil analysis “smells” and “tastes” the condition of machine lubricant and can examine oil particles for traces of internal parts’ wear.

Carrying out an analysis to schedule may find that the interval set for replacing the oil is too short and a longer interval would be sufficient.

A hydraulic press in a tunnel washer line may require 65 gallons of oil. While the manufacturer might recommend a yearly change, oil analysis might find that three years is sufficient, resulting in significant savings in oil costs, labour charges and the cost of machine downtime.

The return on investment in savings and in increased reliability that result from a proactive approach to maintenance has been proved repeatedly.

A programme of preventative and predictive maintenance can keep the laundry running efficiently and reduce costs.

Maintenance is an investment in an organisation’s ability to produce a product or service. It should be regarded as in-house risk management and a means of ensuring that the management’s “vision” for the business is kept alive and well.

Randy Stiver has over 25 years of experience in the industrial laundry industry and has worked in customer service, field engineering, training and education. He is currently the technical director and one of the principals of Astar, a service, training and reliability company.