Maintenance according to EN 13306 - Why we need standards in Maintenance

Hamburg, Germany -- (ReleaseWire) -- 09/21/2020 --Communication is crucial for maintenance workers. Especially when it comes to the documentation of their activities. A transparent delivery of all maintenance tasks helps all parties involved to understand exactly what has happened and what needs to be done on each respective machine.

This means that fault reports documented in a maintenance software need to be detailed in order to achieve sustainable results and improve efficiency.

As the information gathered is used for evaluations, it is important to establish a standardized communication for maintenance. This includes standardized error catalogues, categories and fault descriptions, an organizational manual and functional descriptions. Consistent documentation of maintenance activities will makes it possible to quickly spot recurring problems and possibly even eliminate them in the long run.

EN 13306 is a standard that specifies the terminology for maintenance. It is in no way a guide to a maintenance organization`s set up but rather the definition of maintenance vocabulary for consistent and organization wide utilization. This means that there are no normative principles set by the standard, but a glossary of definitions that are helpful in the organisation of maintenance and maintenance planning.

This definitions in the standard are particularly important for the structure of our maintenance organization as they will serve as a directory for all terminology concerning objects, properties of objects, failures and events, errors and conditions, types of maintenance and terminology associated with the time-tracking of various maintenance-related activities. This will help to spotlight weaknesses in the company's own maintenance department by providing various ways of reporting and time tracking.

When measuring downtime and analyzing administrative or logistical delays, a versatile maintenance software is almost inevitable. MaintMaster works out-of-the-box with a database based on the EN 13306. This means that object types, their order categories and much more are directly marked according to the standard. Hence, one can easily create statistics for time-tracking as defined in the EN 13306.

Of course, the structure of the database can be adapted to the needs of the clients but the default setup is based on the norm.