Inefficiency, downtime, and unplanned stoppages steal from your company's bottomline. Ensuring your production lines are well maintained to avoid unexpected equipment failure is key. Downtime at a busy plant can mean tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars of lost revenue per day. Yet most plants only have a small roster of trained technicians, whose time is in high demand. They’re expected to perform proactive and preventative, as well as reactive/corrective, maintenance as problems arise. Empowering your operators to assist with performing daily preventative maintenance is a methodology called Autonomous Maintenance, or AM.

The promise of Autonomous Maintenance is simple: by empowering your operators to perform regular inspections and maintenance on your machines you will increase your productivity, profitability, and Overall Equipment Efficiency (OEE). At the same time you will transform your frontline staff from “button pushers and switch flickers” to true, engaged, partners responsible for the productivity of your machines and equipment.

If the promise of AM is simple, the execution is not. Deciding what maintenance activities your associates should perform, how often, and how the partnership between operators and the maintenance team will work can be complex. Even once launched effectively, keeping it going long term is another challenge.

In this Ultimate Guide, we will discuss the details of how AM programs work, the benefits you can expect, best practices, and the advantages of a digitized approach.