ISO 9001: Quality Management System – Equipment Maintenance
There are many benefits to becoming ISO 9001:2015 Certified. Those benefits, in a well-established quality management system, extend throughout the organization to all levels.
In Section 7.1.3 of the ISO 9001:2015 standard Infrastructure is discussed. The standard states:
“The organization shall determine, provide and maintain the infrastructure necessary for the operation of its processes and to achieve conformity of products and services. “
Note: Infrastructure can include:
a) Buildings and associated utilities;
b) Equipment, including hardware and software;
c) Transportation resources;
d) Information and communication technology
In this blog post we will focus on the equipment (hardware) that the organization utilizes to produce its products during the manufacturing process or similar.
First, let’s begin with what would be considered a common-sense approach to maintaining your organizations infrastructure. Just like all things in this world of ours, if you do not maintain whatever it is you have it will inevitability fall apart. It is quite literally a law of the universe called entropy, that all things over time move toward disorder! So, your equipment needs to be maintained and taken care of. One such approach to ensuring our machines and equipment do not fall apart is to preventive them from doing so through a regular maintenance schedule. Hence, all organization should have to some degree a preventive maintenance schedule for their equipment and machines that need it. What does such a preventive maintenance program look like?
The initial steps to putting together a preventive maintenance schedule is to create a list or log of all the equipment the organization uses that needs maintenance. If you do not know what maintenance is required, then reviewing the equipment’s recommended maintenance from the manufacturer is a good start. Many devices and pieces of equipment come with or have a documented user manual that will lay out the recommended maintenance schedule. From there you can use a simple spreadsheet to document each piece of equipment and the schedule for performing regular inspections and maintenance.
Generally, the preventive maintenance is broken down into daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual maintenance protocols. If you are maintaining this program on a spreadsheet, such as our equipment maintenance log template you can similarly add the requirement maintenance and associated frequency along with the due dates for each.
If you would like to get a bit more sophisticated there are many options for preventive maintenance software available for a relatively low cost. Here are few links below to review. We commonly work with micro and small businesses, so the cheapest and more efficient approach is generally the spreadsheet, but software sometimes is a better fit. All depending on your needs.
Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) Software for Preventive Maintenance:
· eMaint CMMS: Extend asset life with the top rated CMMS built for connected reliability | Fluke Corporation
Wilkshire Consulting Downloadable Documents:
Equipment Calibration Log
Equipment Maintenance Log
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