Twelve CMMS Tips for Power Plant Maintenance Management
Effective maintenance management is the backbone of power plant operations, ensuring reliability, safety, and regulatory compliance.
Mainsaver, a leading Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS), provides powerful tools to streamline your power plant maintenance. In this article, we’ll explore valuable tips for optimizing power plant maintenance management using Mainsaver CMMS.
1: Ensure Regulatory Compliance
Mainsaver’s compliance functionality allows you to designate NERC-related and other regulatory Preventive Maintenance (PM) tasks and work orders. By doing so, all regulatory work completed can be quickly recalled during audits, ensuring your power plant stays compliant with industry regulations.
2: Automate Regulatory PMs
Set up “Auto-PM Generation” for NERC, EPA and other regulatory-required, date-sensitive PMs. This feature prevents critical regulatory tasks from being overlooked by automatically generating and scheduling them, guaranteeing timely execution.
3: Incident Documentation
Utilize Mainsaver’s Incident Module to comprehensively document, process, and report all FERC-required operational incidents. This specialized module streamlines incident reporting and ensures compliance with power generation incident reporting standards.
4: Analyze Failure Patterns
Use ‘Fault’ codes to identify repetitive equipment failures and ‘Cause’ codes to pinpoint the root causes. This information is invaluable for implementing countermeasures, including condition-based monitoring, new PMs, training, or asset replacement.
5: Timely Alerts
Mainsaver’s “work order past due” notification feature is a game-changer. It sends alerts to maintenance technicians when critical work is due, either days before or after the work order due dates. This ensures that date-sensitive tasks, including regulatory work, are completed on time.
6: Runtime-based PMs
While some PMs may be scheduled on a calendar frequency, equipment with irregular usage patterns may benefit from runtime-based scheduling. Mainsaver offers active integrations to equipment connected systems such as the Aveva™ Pi System™ that allow you to kick off PMs based on runtimes. By leveraging this integration, you can ensure that maintenance activities are synchronized with equipment usage, reducing the risk of over-maintenance or under-maintenance and optimizing the reliability of your power plant assets.
7: Streamline Maintenance Operations
The Projects functionality in Mainsaver is perfect for marking all PMs and work orders related to annual/bi-annual maintenance outages and turnarounds. Easily group and print designated work orders during the outage, and generate a project summary upon completion, providing valuable details and cost totals.
8: Mobile Maintenance
Mainsaver Connect empowers your maintenance team to create, document, and process both corrective and PM work orders directly from the field using tablets or phones. Attach images of equipment issues to work orders for better issue description and improved troubleshooting.
9: Paperless Job Plan Instructions
With Mainsaver Connect, your technicians can complete and sign off on PM job plan instructions directly from the field via their mobile devices. This eliminates the need for paper documentation, streamlining the maintenance process.
10: Optimize Spare Parts Management
Set up min/max values for critical spare parts within Mainsaver to automate reorder lists or purchase requisitions. This ensures that essential parts are never out of stock, minimizing downtime and ensuring smooth operations.
11: Asset – Part Association
Ensure that every part with a stock number is associated with at least one asset. This practice simplifies the analysis of spares when assets are decommissioned, helping you determine whether to remove items from the stockroom. Identify critical spares that should receive priority when reviewing order point items.
12: Cost Analysis
Use Mainsaver’s reporting capabilities to analyze the cost of maintenance. Create queries to identify high-cost stock usage, and generate reports to track dollars spent by supplier and dollars allocated to maintain specific assets. This data-driven approach enables you to make informed decisions and optimize your maintenance budget.