Autonomous Maintenance

Autonomous maintenance is a type of maintenance that focuses on empowering machine operators to make the necessary maintenance decisions and fixes, without the aid of a specialized maintenance technician. It’s generally a part of a total productive maintenance strategy and is considered to be the first steppingstone to these types of strategic plans.

Autonomous maintenance has an impact on all other maintenance types. By enabling the people who work on these machines to notice, fix, and improve day-to-day operations, strategies that once covered things like  routine maintenance and  corrective maintenance can be rolled into your operators’ tasks, instead of your maintenance technicians’ days.

This is because,  the core idea of autonomous maintenance is to provide day-to-day operators with more responsibility and to better maintain your machines and other equipment.

It’s good to know that this is just  a brief overview of autonomous maintenance. There’s much more beyond the simple definitions.

A quick start guide to implementing autonomous maintenance

There are five simple steps to  implementing autonomous maintenance:

1. Educating your operators.
2. Cleaning and inspecting all of your equipment.
3. Developing standards for your operators.
4. Implementing specific goals.
5. Testing and iterating your new autonomous maintenance plan!

The top benefits of autonomous maintenance

Some of the best benefits of autonomous maintenance include:

• Lowering labor costs.
• Increasing the availability of specialists.
• Improving team cohesiveness and community.
• Educating all members of your team on proper protocol for your equipment.
• And much more.

At the end of the day, autonomous maintenance is all about putting power back into machine operators’ hands, so that they can fix, maintain, and care for the equipment they know the best.