Steps of Perform Emergency Maintenance Effectively

Emergency, as name suggests, means stressful events that can cause greater damages. Any type of emergency requires immediate action to be performed. Emergency Maintenance (EM) is a type of maintenance action that is required to perform immediately whenever any emergency i.e. equipment or asset failures occurs unexpectedly. EM is performed to restore asset back to its normal working condition.

Emergency maintenance generally aims at preventing lives of employees, technicians, production, product quality, reliability, profitability, and viability of an organization.

Steps to Perform EM Effectively :
Performing EM is important and is not an easy task. To get most output from EM, one needs to perform EM effectively step by step. One should always follow some rules and procedures as well as protocols also to minimize chances of mistakes, risk of safety, and increasing speed of working. To perform EM effectively, there are four major steps that one should follow. These steps are given below :

1. Define and Identify Emergencies :
   One needs to understand what actually emergency means before proceeding towards any measures. Emergency is something that causes greater threat to life’s, system, production, etc. and therefore requires immediate action to be taken to minimize its impact. Not every failure or issue that occurs considered emergencies. One needs to able to differentiate between failures or breakdowns that are true emergencies and failures that are not emergencies. There can be two types of situations of failures as given below :
   • True emergencies –
     These are failures that are very critical and cause greater damage to system. These failures are required to addressed immediately after failure occurs so that its negative impact can be minimized. These failures are considered true emergencies.
   • Non-emergencies –
     These are failures that are not critical and causes do not cause greater damage to system. These failures do not require to be addressed immediately after failure occurs and can be addressed later whenever possible. These failures are considered non-emergencies.

   Therefore, it’s very essential for one to understand, identify, and define failure that is true emergencies so that immediate action can be taken. It simply helps organizations to deal with situations more effectively and manage their resources that are important to resolve such situations.

2. Define Emergency Maintenance Workflow :
   After deciding failures that are considered emergency, second step is to define how emergency action will be implemented, about its details, how it’s going to end. These all are important points and should be recorded. These record or workflow can be done either in two ways :
   • Manual Response –
     In this response, record is usually created by employees without any involvement of system.
   • Automated Response –
     In this response, record is usually created by system without any involvement of human beings.
3. Outline Emergency Maintenance Procedures :
   After defining EM workflow, next step is to determine procedure i.e. Steps that one needs to follow to carry out emergency maintenance. These steps are given below :
   • Identify root cause of problem.
   • Determine present condition of assets.
   • Prevent employees and all workers from its negative impact.
   • Gather resources and tools that are required to perform EM.
   • Plan EM process
   • Execute EM process.
4. Speed Up EM Response with CMMS :
   Computerized Maintenance Management System (CMMS) is considered to be one of best ways to speed up maintenance process. If one chooses automate response that CMMS is considered best system to speed up EM. CMMS is capable of scheduling work orders quickly and more appropriately and also helps one to decide appropriate technicians for performing EM.