posted 14 March 1999 03:08 PM            

Hope this helps

posted 01 May 1999 01:02 PM            

I have another current question, that I know a lot of companies are wondering about; Predictive maintenance.

QS-9000, third edition, 4.9.g.1, says you shall "develop an effective planned total preventive maintenance system. At a minimum, this system shall include: . . Predictive maintenance methods - These methods should include a review of appropriate items such as the manufacturer's recommendations, tool wear, optimization of uptime, correlation of SPC data to preventive maintenance activities, important characteristics of perishable tooling, fluid analysis, infrared monitoring of circuits and vibration analysis. . ."

That's what the book says. Doesn't sound that hard to fulfill. "Include a review of appropriate items such as...". Our Quality manual presently says:

"Predictive Maintenance In those cases where we discover abnormal variations in the process, for esample by analysis of X-R-diagrammes and/or by abnormal tool wear, this shall be considered for preventive maintenance."

Our company is not yet QS-9000 certified. In the audition, we got two nonconformances regarding this subject.

One because what is "abnormal variations in the process" isn't clearly described/controlled. The other because we couldn't show any plans for predictive maintenance on key equipment.

Our business is lathing. Our company doesn't use any vibration analysis tools, nor are we planning to get any. We use annual infrared monitoring on electric circuits, but this is not described in our quality system. We use SPC a lot. Of course we use the manufacturer's recommendations for preventive maintenance. Our idea of solving this nonconformance is to point out that SPC-data is a tool for predicting maintenance needs.

How can we handle this? What is our auditor asking us to do? How can we rephrase our quality system to conform to the standard? Do we need to change our maintenance routines?

I am VERY greatful for any hints you might give me. The standard is very brief in this subject, I think. And it is also connected to the company's maintenance strategy. Shouldn't really be controlled in the QS-9000 standard, in my opinion. Comments?

Svante Johansson

Torsten Ullman AB

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Subject: Re: Predictive Maintenance
Date: Tue, 27 Apr 1999 14:02:30 -0700
From: NJ Marinaro
Organization: The PYXIS Group
To: [email protected]
CC: [email protected] References: 1

SPC for maintenance and Predictive Maintenance is good for the product, but I believe that the resultant information is historical. That is, something changed now what do I fix. You then go into Corrective Action (Maintenance) not necessarily preventive action.

"We use annual infrared monitoring on electric circuits, but this is not described in our quality system." Add it to your quality system.

"...we use the manufacturer's recommendations..." Add a pointer in your quality system.

I would recommend you look at several things and track them in a database with regard to maintenance. Among them are repair parts usage, maintenance intervals (machine name and number and category of what and when), up and down time, actual repair time, cost of maintenance per machine, and so on. By tracking these items you can begin to do an analysis of what changes relative to time or material processed.