Early equipment management is a one of the total productive maintenance pillars. EEM pillar is very helpful to improve & maintain lifecycle of equipment. To improve equipment reliability, productivity, defects, safety & quality EEM pillars play a vital role. EEM pillar closely work with the operations, finance and maintenance team & focused to improve productivity of equipment. The important key areas that EEM pillar mainly works on too easy for assembly, operations, changeover, quality, cost, safety and eco-friendly.
Content
- What is early equipment management?
- Objective of early equipment management pillar.
- Important key areas of early equipment management.
- Benefits of EEM pillar implementation.
What is Early Equipment Management
Before we proceed to understand EEM Meaning, try to understand process approach. In general practice two types of approach is used to react on a process performance, proactive approach and reactive approach. For machine maintenance point of view proactive approach means identify the failure opportunities before parts are fail & reactive approach means after parts failure focused on to correctness rather than prediction of failure consequences.
Early equipment management is mainly focused on to manage machines or equipment’s in advance just like FMEA tools is used to identify possibilities for errors or defects in the process. Early equipment pillar is follow the proactive approach. EEM deals with the issues, that equipment can facing in terms of individual parts life cycle, equipment design point of view and easy for operation & maintenance point of view.
Objective of Early Equipment Management Pillar
- Reduce maintenance cost.
- Improve productivity of equipment.
- Prevent repetitive problems that operation & maintenance teams are facing.
- Improve machine reliability.
- Improve equipment lifecycle.
Important Key Areas of Early Equipment Management
EEM pillar implementation are mainly divided into six major categories as per mention below. Basically for perfect TPM implementation each and every individual TPM pillar work with the other pillars are very important. For producing world class results each & every TPM pillars collectively work is very essential & continuously identifying problems as well as its solution for minimize or eliminate it.
Equipment Design: – For fulfilling industrial products function as per standard, perfect equipment design condition is very Important for improve & maintain equipment productivity. Usage of standard parts, Components are easily replaceable & durable, easy to use and its service life these four parameters are very important for equipment design criteria.
Equipment’s are basically categorized into two parts, General purpose machine & special purpose machine. Special purpose machine work very accurately as per product criteria in industries but general purpose machine takes more time to familiar with the individual industrial products. For continuously improving process equipment modifications very important with respect to technological changes as well as operational & maintenance requirements.
Equipment Downtime: – Equipment downtime is one of the very important objective of total productive maintenance. There are several parameters are dependent on equipment downtime but EEM pillar focused on downtime due to spare improper management, due to improper equipment’s parts design, hard to access areas, defects generations due to equipment issues any many more.
Equipment Spare Management: – Equipment spare management is basically part of inventory & store management, but EEM pillar mainly focused on to ensure individual life cycle of parts, regularly inspection of machines. The very important part of equipment spare management is controlling inventory and its directly impact on cost. Equipment spare management not only focused on design changes, downtime time reduction, easy to access areas but also they are structurally focused on to minimize the cost aspect for managing equipment.
Operator Involvement: – EEM pillar suggest that operator involvement is essential for procurement new equipment, modify existing equipment and repair existing equipment because operator is closely working with the equipment and they are knowing very well about the variations or abnormalities.
Training & Awareness: – Training and awareness is a very essential thing to implement total productive maintenance. Identify abnormalities, reporting suggestion for improvements and modify the equipment’s design based on the product changes or customer’s requirement changes, these few points focused on to updates into operator’s routine activity. The main task of EEM pillar is to proactive work & focused on to identify equipment failure opportunities as well as identify countermeasures for failure opportunities and plan to minimize or eliminate it.
Benefits for early equipment management pillar implementation
Review below attached benefits of early equipment management pillar for TPM Implementation.
Easy for assembly: – EEM helps to focused on equipment’s design in a such a way to minimize assembly time or easy to assembly process.
Easy for operation & maintenance: – Easy for operation and maintenance makes minimum throughput time and ultimately increase OEE of equipment.
Easy for changeover: – EEM pillar focused to minimize equipment parts changeover based on identify internal & external activities and focused to minimize external activities based on parts modifications.
Improve quality: – For quality improvement equipment accuracy is very essential. EEM pillar works on to consistently measure equipment accuracy & identify frequency for increasing quality variations due to equipment design issue.
Minimize cost: – The main aim of TPM implementation is to minimize the cost. Sometimes value of maintenance cost increases compares to equipment value, because improper equipment management. So EEM pillar mainly identify abnormalities proactively before parts breakdown.
Improve safety: – Safety is the essential factor for any organization. So ultimately aim of EEM pillar is to minimize injury or accidents due to equipment’s.
Eco-friendly equipment condition: – Eco-friendly equipment condition is to aim for minimize the pollution. Identify eco-friendly abnormalities and focused on to minimize it based on design modifications.