What is autonomous maintenance and how is it used?

It is worth considering that autonomous maintenance is one of the main components of a system called holistic productive maintenance. It involves all employees of the company in a maintenance action based on the transfer of activities related to basic technical tasks to machine operators. As a result, there is an increase in operator responsibilities, while mechanics are seeing a substantial reduction in those responsibilities.

What activities can operators perform when standalone maintenance is correctly implemented?

Above all, their field of activity, and therefore their competence, is substantially increased. Beyond their current capabilities, they may also:

• Detect earlier the malfunction of the equipment used,
• Visually evaluate the technical state of the machinery,
• Detect the effects of damage early enough to implement appropriate intervention and action earlier,
• Maintain the machine at regular intervals,
• Perform simple repairs.

In doing so, the work related to an area is spread over more people. More employees are in charge of a particular topic, which leads them to take more responsibility.

What are the benefits of autonomous maintenance?

Good implementation of autonomous maintenance generates benefits that have a very positive impact on the whole work and organization of the company.

The first of these advantages is the evident time-saving. If more people are involved in one task, this work can be completed more rapidly. If it is the operators who can start to act in terms of repairing used machines, the wait for the mechanic to act disappears, which streamlines the process and the matter that the machine’s work is controlled regularly.

The next obvious benefit is increased productivity. By continuously inspecting machines and being able to perform basic repairs, operators can do their jobs much more efficiently.

A third advantage is to ease the burden on employees with multiple responsibilities by delegating the simplest elements to others. In this case, mechanics are relieved to delegate multiple duties to operators.

A final advantage is that failures can be detected rapidly by continually observing the operation of the machine. With a more efficient diagnosis, the problem can be resolved at a stage when the problem is still weak.

As can be seen, autonomous maintenance is a more than desirable phenomenon and allows many benefits to be realized in the operation of the company. It’s worth looking into.