What is Industrial Maintenance?
Industrial maintenance is the practice of maintaining industrial machines and preventing breakdowns. Industrial maintenance involves regular upkeep, emergency repairs, and long-term preventive and predictive strategies. It’s also called plant maintenance, as it often refers to industrial plant assets.
The goal of industrial maintenance is to reduce downtime, increase asset longevity, and strengthen overall asset reliability. Poorly running machinery consumes excessive energy, leads to wasted materials, and causes costly downtime. The crucial practice of industrial maintenance ensures that manufacturing plants, factories, and other industrial facilities operate efficiently, safely, and with minimal downtime.
When industrial maintenance teams keep assets running as designed, it helps maximize safety, output, and uptime, boosting the bottom line. Activities like the servicing, repairing, and replacing machine assets — from small bearings to entire buildings — in an industrial setting fall under the umbrella of industrial maintenance.
Industrial maintenance involves a range of activities, including regular inspections, preventive maintenance, corrective repairs, and the use of advanced monitoring technologies to predict and prevent failures.
Industrial maintenance is vital for several reasons:
- Operational efficiency: Regular maintenance helps ensure that equipment operates at peak performance, reducing the likelihood of unexpected breakdowns that can disrupt production schedules.
- Safety: Properly maintained equipment is less likely to fail in ways that could harm workers, making industrial maintenance a key component of workplace safety.
- Cost savings: By preventing major breakdowns and extending equipment lifespans, industrial maintenance can save companies significant amounts of money in the long run.
- Regulatory compliance: Many industries are subject to strict regulations regarding equipment maintenance. Adhering to these standards is essential to avoid fines and legal issues.
Common Industrial Maintenance Jobs and Types of Workers
Industrial maintenance requires a diverse workforce with various skills and expertise. Generally speaking, people working in industrial maintenance need to be skilled in performing hands-on work, following directions, and familiar with a work order management system.
Here are some common jobs and types and workers involved in industrial maintenance:
- Maintenance technicians:
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- Role: Perform routine inspections, repairs, and industrial equipment servicing. Technicians diagnose issues, replace faulty components, and ensure machinery operates smoothly.
- Skills: Technical knowledge of machinery, problem-solving abilities, and proficiency in using various tools and equipment.
- Maintenance engineers:
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- Role: Develop and oversee maintenance strategies to ensure equipment reliability. They analyze performance data, recommend improvements, and implement preventive maintenance plans.
- Skills: Engineering expertise, analytical skills, and experience with maintenance planning software.
- Reliability engineers:
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- Role: Focus on improving the long-term reliability of equipment. They study failure data, identify root causes, and develop strategies to enhance equipment reliability and minimize downtime.
- Skills: Strong analytical abilities, knowledge of reliability engineering principles, and experience with predictive maintenance technologies.
- Maintenance managers:
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- Role: Oversee the entire maintenance department, ensuring that all activities are carried out efficiently and effectively. They manage resources, coordinate schedules, and ensure compliance with safety and regulatory standards.
- Skills: Leadership and management skills, strategic planning, and knowledge of maintenance best practices.
- Condition monitoring technicians:
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- Role: Use advanced monitoring tools and technologies to assess the condition of equipment in real-time. They collect and analyze data to predict potential failures and recommend timely interventions.
- Skills: Proficiency with monitoring technologies, data analysis skills, and attention to detail.
- Planners and schedulers:
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- Role: Responsible for planning and scheduling maintenance activities. They ensure that maintenance tasks are carried out at the right time and with minimal disruption to operations.
- Skills: Organizational and planning skills, experience with scheduling software, and the ability to balance maintenance needs with production demands.
Each role within an industrial maintenance team is crucial for ensuring efficient and reliable equipment operation. By working together, these professionals help prevent unexpected failures, optimize maintenance schedules, and improve overall equipment performance.
Your team also may need to rely on contractors for maintenance that requires specialized knowledge or tools. For example, some types of equipment calibration, vibration analysis, electrical repairs, robotics or automation repairs, and elevator maintenance are all tasks that may need to be outsourced to a specialist.
Sometimes, it can be difficult to find individuals who can perform the tasks your organization needs. Cross-training your existing staff to teach new skills can help combat these limitations. Using specialized software, like a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS), can also help provide your team with checklists, guidelines, and necessary steps to complete their tasks, making it easier for team members to perform the maintenance your organization needs.
Which Industries Use Industrial Maintenance?
Industrial maintenance is a vital component across numerous industries, each with specific needs and challenges. Here are some of the major industries that rely heavily on industrial maintenance:
- Manufacturing
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- Overview: Involves the production of goods using machinery and labor. Maintenance is crucial to ensure continuous production and prevent costly downtimes.
- Key maintenance activities: Regular inspections, preventive maintenance, condition monitoring, and predictive maintenance to keep production lines running smoothly.
- Energy and utilities:
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- Overview: Includes power generation, water treatment, and utility services. Maintenance ensures reliable service delivery and compliance with safety regulations.
- Key maintenance activities: Scheduled inspections, real-time monitoring, and advanced diagnostics to maintain infrastructure and prevent service interruptions.
- Oil and gas
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- Overview: Involves exploration, extraction, refining, and distribution of oil and gas. Maintenance is essential to ensure safe and efficient operations.
- Key maintenance activities: Corrosion control, regular inspections, condition-based maintenance, and the use of predictive analytics to prevent failures.
- Transportation and logistics
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- Overview: Covers the movement of goods and people. Maintenance ensures the reliability and safety of vehicles, aircraft, ships, and infrastructure.
- Key maintenance activities: Routine servicing, component replacements, safety inspections, and adherence to regulatory standards.
Food and beverage
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- Overview: Involves the processing and packaging of food and beverages. Maintenance is critical to ensure product quality, safety, and compliance with hygiene standards.
- Key maintenance activities: Cleaning, calibration, lubrication, and regular inspections to maintain equipment and prevent contamination.
- Pharmaceuticals
- Overview: Involves the production of medicines and medical devices. Maintenance ensures the precision and reliability of production equipment.
- Key maintenance activities: Preventive maintenance, regular inspections, calibration, and strict adherence to regulatory requirements to ensure product quality and safety.
- Mining
- Overview: Involves the extraction of minerals and raw materials. Maintenance is essential to ensure the reliability and efficiency of heavy machinery and equipment.
- Key maintenance activities: Regular servicing, component replacements, system checks, and the use of advanced diagnostics to prevent breakdowns.
- Healthcare facilities
- Overview: Involves maintaining facilities for patient care, such as hospitals, assisted living facilities, and hospice centers. Maintenance is needed to ensure medical equipment is functioning well and the entire facility is safe and hygienic for both employees and patients.
- Key maintenance activities: Cleaning, preventive maintenance for medical equipment and facility equipment like HVAC systems and plumbing, regular inspections, adherence to compliance requirements, and safety checks for critical equipment like fire extinguishers and exit signs.
- Hospitality facilities
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- Overview: Involves maintenance for hotels, resorts, apartment complexes, and similar facilities. Maintenance is critical for ensuring guest safety and satisfaction, as well as compliance with government regulations.
- Key maintenance activities: Inspections and cleaning of HVAC and plumbing systems, addressing immediate needs like electrical outages or broken appliances, cleaning, regular inspection of safety equipment such as fire extinguishers, inspecting and repairing security systems. Also ensuring that common areas like pools, entryways, and fitness centers are clean and equipment is operational.
Examples of Industrial Maintenance
Industrial maintenance covers almost any task that needs to be performed in a plant. Here are a few examples of the types of maintenance included in industrial maintenance:
Conveyor Belt Maintenance
Conveyor belts are critical components in many industrial processes, particularly in manufacturing and material handling. Routine maintenance for conveyor belts involves several key tasks:
- Inspection: Regularly checking for wear and tear, misalignment, and damage to the belt and its components.
- Lubrication: Ensuring that bearings, rollers, and other moving parts are properly lubricated to reduce friction and wear.
- Belt tensioning: Adjusting the tension to prevent slippage and ensure smooth operation. Too much or too little tension can cause operational issues and accelerate wear.
HVAC System Maintenance
Heating, ventilation, and air conditioning (HVAC) systems are vital for maintaining a controlled environment in industrial facilities. Common maintenance tasks for HVAC systems include:
- Filter replacement: Regularly replacing air filters to maintain air quality and system efficiency.
- Coil cleaning: Cleaning the evaporator and condenser coils to improve heat exchange efficiency and prevent system overload.
- Inspection and calibration: Checking thermostats and control systems to ensure they are functioning correctly and calibrating them as needed to maintain desired temperature and humidity levels.
Pump and Motor Maintenance
Pumps and motors are plentiful in various industrial applications, from water supply to process control. Maintenance tasks for these components often include:
- Alignment checks: Verifying that motors and pumps are properly aligned to avoid excessive vibration and wear.
- Lubrication: Regularly lubricating bearings and other moving parts to minimize friction and prevent overheating.
- Performance testing: Monitoring and testing the performance of pumps and motors to detect issues such as reduced flow rates or abnormal noises, indicating potential problems.
Compressor System Maintenance
Compressor systems are present in many industrial processes, such as powering pneumatic tools and moving compressed gasses. Maintenance tasks for compressor systems may include:
- Filter checks and replacement: Consistently checking and replacing air filters to ensure the gas can move through the system and that any pollutants or contaminants have been removed.
- Lubrication: Regularly lubricating bearings, gears, and other components to help the compressor run smoothly and avoid unnecessary wear on components.
- Regular inspections: There are many types of compressors, but they all need to be inspected for leaks, proper lubricant levels, contamination, and other factors based on the compressor’s needs and maintenance timeline.
Milling Machine Maintenance
Milling machines use rotary cutters to remove material from work pieces. They are used in a variety of industries, including automotive, medical equipment production, agriculture, and many more. Maintenance for milling machines includes:
- Cleaning: Removing dust, debris, and residue buildup to ensure the milling machine can perform as expected.
- Lubrication: Regularly lubricating moving parts like slides, gears, and bearings according to the manufacturer’s specifications to ensure smooth operation and reduced wear and tear on components.
- Calibration and alignment: Performing regular calibration and alignment to help the machine maintain its accuracy and avoid wasted materials from improper machining.
This is just a small example of the tasks included in industrial maintenance. Troubleshooting equipment problems, scheduling future maintenance tasks, performing regular inspections, and spare parts inventory management are all included in industrial maintenance.
Industrial Maintenance Strategy
Industrial machinery, from common assets like motors to sophisticated systems like wind turbines, follows a lifecycle from installation to operation and, eventually, end-of-life or breakdown. Maintenance is key to optimizing equipment lifespan — making sure assets perform effectively for as long as possible.
We often think of maintenance as an emergency response to faults, failures, or total breakdowns, and it’s true that industrial maintenance work is often reactive firefighting. Maintenance is vital to employee safety, like when an ammonia compressor fails and toxic gas leaks. It’s also essential for compliance with key regulations from OSHA to the FDA and IATF. And of course, maintenance keeps production going and revenue flowing.
But relying on reactive or breakdown maintenance as your only strategy can be disastrous. A strictly reactive approach wastes time, labor, and money and slows down production.
Forward-looking maintenance strategies can complement reactive ones – and lead to better-managed assets that stay up and running longer. Maintenance and reliability teams can harness the power of preventive, condition-based, and predictive maintenance to maximize uptime. Here’s how different maintenance strategies compare:
- Reactive maintenance is performed in response to machine issues, ranging from minor faults to major failures. Also known as “run-to-failure” maintenance, reactive maintenance is only performed when problems arise. A reactive approach is ideal for easily-replaceable parts like lightbulbs, but can be problematic for complex and critical industrial machines.
- Breakdown maintenance is a strategy in which workers wait until a machine fully breaks down or is out of operation before performing maintenance work. A breakdown maintenance strategy can make sense for non-critical assets, but is dangerous and costly when applied to production-critical machines.
- Preventive maintenance (PM) involves planning regular maintenance to prevent faults and failures. Preventive maintenance is scheduled at regular time intervals or equipment usage intervals. A PM approach to industrial maintenance reduces the risk of asset downtime and is important for essential assets.
- Condition-based maintenance (CBM) is work done in response to asset condition data, like vibration or temperature levels, that gives insight into machine health. CBM is vital for sophisticated machines that need to be monitored to know when maintenance is needed.
- Predictive maintenance (PdM) is maintenance work performed in advance of a breakdown that is informed by predictive data, like detailed vibration data captured by wireless sensors. Predictive maintenance is a powerful tool for maxing the uptime and strengthening the reliability of your most critical assets.
- Reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) is a framework that focuses on the big picture: what maintenance strategy is best for each asset or type of asset to achieve cost-effective uptime? A reliability-centered strategy calls on the best approach for the job, from run-to-failure maintenance to preventive maintenance. Reliability-centered maintenance often involves asset criticality assessment (ACA), failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA), and fault tree analysis (FTA) as methods to analyze assets and determine the ideal game plan.
How do industrial maintenance teams manage and implement these strategies across their maintenance programs?
That’s where industrial maintenance management software comes in.
Why Use Industrial Maintenance Software?
Industrial maintenance teams need maintenance software to manage, plan, and execute a winning strategy.
Maintenance software serves as a command center for work orders, asset management, spare parts inventory, maintenance KPI reporting, and much more. Leading maintenance management software also offer mobile apps, condition monitoring, integrations with key business systems, and global, multi-site capabilities.
Common software types include computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) and enterprise asset management (EAM) systems, which often overlap.
A CMMS or EAM empowers industrial maintenance teams to save time, simplify their work, cut costs, prevent downtime, and increase overall asset reliability.
Industrial maintenance teams often use a combination of maintenance strategies throughout their facility, and a CMMS can improve any of them. Here are some concrete ways a CMMS can aid different approaches:
- Reactive maintenance: When an asset fails or isn’t performing as expected, team members can create a maintenance work order, assign a technician, and even upload key details about the problem. The work order and asset history in the CMMS give the technician vital tools to help troubleshoot and correct the problem as quickly as possible, minimizing downtime.
- Preventive maintenance: Managers can create and assign work orders for regular preventive maintenance tasks like inspections, filter changes, lubrication, and cleaning. These tasks can also be automated to occur regularly, ensuring teams stay on top of vital PMs over time.
- Predictive maintenance: When wireless sensors receive data that indicates the asset is operating outside of its ideal conditions, a CMMS can notify users of potential faults by creating alarms and work orders automatically, ensuring developing issues are fixed as quickly as possible.
- Reliability-centered maintenance: Companies implementing an RCM strategy can use a CMMS to document the maintenance methods, checklists, and other key data for each asset. Then, they can use KPIs and data from the CMMS to continually improve their RCM model and ensure every asset receives the correct maintenance at the right time.
When teams track, trend, and analyze asset condition data, they can make better decisions, prioritize their scheduling and spending, and reduce costs.
Increased visibility into industrial maintenance activities enables teams to identify trends, adapt to changing priorities, and improve their communication and processes. Centralizing all documentation — from contracts to manuals — simplifies the compliance process and ensures that maintenance team members can securely access the information they need anytime and anywhere.
To make the most of your industrial maintenance program, you need to define your maintenance management goals and targets. A CMMS like eMaint can track metrics, generate reports, and deliver insights you can use to reach your goals.
See how eMaintS allows you to manage assets, create and assign work orders, view live asset status, manage inventory, reduce costs, and more with a CMMS demo walkthrough.
