Maintenance in Transition (Part I)

The three-part series of articles investigates the various aspects of maintenance and its importance today. Part I recounts the historical development of maintenance, from emergency repair services right through to the role of maintenance in accompanying production and planning and as a value-adding factor.

In former days, production and maintenance were generally kept entirely separate, as was practiced at Preussag Stahl AG at the time almost 30 years ago: Maintenance in the Salzgitter steelworks was managed centrally by a senior executive reporting directly to the Executive Board. A change set in in 1995 when each product group was assigned its own “plant engineering” department for maintenance work on electrics and mechanics, supplemented by automation and process technology in 1998. The head of each product group was responsible for production and maintenance. From that point onward, production employees began to engage more concertedly in maintenance and to solve minor problems themselves instead of calling in the specialists: They dismantled machine cladding, changed components, got them working again, and production employees rather than maintenance technicians replaced blast furnace sieve cassettes. During this phase of transition, vocational training, also shifted – away from the process engineer and toward the industrial mechanic who went on to train in process technology. Furthermore, when cutting-edge analysis technology increasingly rendered with the deployment of specialized material testers obsolete, machine operators and industrial mechanics underwent training to qualify as advanced technicians. The success of this development was measurable: having employees in production carrying out maintenance work helped to minimize downtime. 

Nowadays the most important goals in managing maintenance are as follows: avoiding downtime or at least limiting outages and their impact on production. Against the backdrop of intense competitive pressure, companies are dependent on low failure rates, which is why maintenance has moved away from being a cost factor to become a value driver. Since securing plant availability and guaranteeing process stability and product quality were tasks assigned a top priority, maintenance is inextricably linked to production today and included in the planning of new plants to enable them to be designed with a view to facilitating maintenance. Along with the responsibility for ensuring success, the requirements placed on maintenance have also increased. Maintenance and replacement intervals are now shorter. According to the German Engineering Federation (VDMA), the life cycle of electronic components has been reduced to a mere two years. Furthermore, new regulations and legislation, including more stringent requirements on a plant’s energy efficiency, may necessitate replacement, of a drive motor for instance. 

Plant technology has essentially become extremely complex. Detecting the reason for a failure is often no easy task – take a broken shaft or a defective motor, for instance. Laptops and smart phones as digital, mobile diagnosis devices have therefore replaced spanner and hammer, as faults are now not only caused by defective material but also by programming errors, malware or incorrectly executed updates. In the age of Industry 4.0, digitalization and networking have become important drivers of maintenance and have ushered in “smart maintenance”. Sensors enable plant technology with self-monitoring and control functions, and at some point it may perhaps become the norm that replacement parts are sent only in the form of datasets to be manufactured on site by way of 3-D print. Networking, digital communication and virtual reality applications already allow remote maintenance to a high standard today. In addition, new tasks have fleshed out the maintenance requirements profile. Part of these tasks is a mandate for permanent optimization and brings sustainability into focus: Consistently improving energy efficiency, conserving all resources and reconditioning components and replacement parts have added to the scope of tasks incurred by modern maintenance. 

These tenets are especially applicable to the steel industry – not only because its facilities for producing, forming and processing steel often operate at the limit of their capacity, but also because they are on the verge of sea changes brought about by decarbonization. The construction of new and conversion of existing plants will present challenges for maintenance that cannot be fully foreseen at the present point in time and that will necessitate flexible, swift and competent action in securing processes. Most important in this phase of development, in spite of technology, automation and digitalization, will be the human factor, meaning the employees and their training. The knowledge and experience of a “problem solver” are key assets in maintenance, along with the ability to be fast and creative in finding solutions to unexpected difficulties.

You can find this and other articles of Salzgitter AG’ STIL magazine here and also on the STIL app (only available in german):
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