01 Strategy & Planning

In our isolated world of maintenance and asset management, we often struggle to make a solid case for improvements we know will be of value to our organizations. Our managers and executives often don’t “get it,” and our best arguments just don’t hit the mark. Communicating what we know to be true is our responsibility; we cannot expect our audience to understand our knowledge domain as we do. We need to send clear, unambiguous messages that will be understood by the listener. This presentation will focus on ways to communicate the value that arises with good maintenance, and operational and asset management practices, throughout the lifecycle of physical assets. “Value” is often misinterpreted to mean “low cost,” especially in the accounting community. To them, value comes from minimizing any and all costs. Operations managers often interpret “value” as the ability to deliver more and avoid any downtime on any machine involved in production. To them, denying downtime for maintenance is a good thing to do. Maintainers tend to interpret value to mean fewer failures. Yet the avoidance of all failures may actually expend needless resources where there’s no need. Engineers often think of value deriving from the delivery of projects on time and on budget—even better if delivered earlier or at lower-than-estimated costs. Spending less upfront, however, can lead to high operating and maintenance costs for years to come. To an extent, they’re all correct, but they’re all missing the true meaning. We’ll speak to value, what it is, how our organizations can ensure it’s delivered, and how we can make a case to our managers and executives so they’ll understand. This presentation is based on Paying Your Way (2020), which will be used as a text for all participants, summarizing several case studies.    Originally presented at MainTrain 2020, September 15, 2020.   Webcast presented January 12, 2021

As the influence of the asset management approach continues to expand within Nova Scotia Power, we need a structured approach to ensure we continue to seek opportunities to optimize maintenance strategies. In a new installation, techniques such as failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) and reliability centred maintenance (RCM) can be used to develop an optimized maintenance strategy from the start, in a top-down approach. However, the vast majority of Nova Scotia Power’s equipment was in place long before the asset management office—and, therefore, the asset management approach—existed. The result of that is a collection of value-added, but developed after-the-fact maintenance strategies. Each maintenance strategy has components of operator surveillance (rounds), testing, predictive pattern recognition (also known as advanced pattern recognition, APR), predictive maintenance (condition-based monitoring and risk-based inspections), online monitoring, and preventative maintenance. While efforts had been made to “baseline” the equipment processes when maintenance strategies were developed (i.e., “clean out” existing activities), the organic growth of the approach and the distributed nature of assets and personnel have made this difficult to maintain. Therefore, we needed an approach to optimize existing maintenance strategies, without recreating them. Nova Scotia Power has therefore undertaken an effort known as maintenance strategy optimization, and has made this activity a core accountability for the asset management team, which recognizes the need to seek continuous improvement (vs. a one-time exercise). With a focus on digitization wherever appropriate, Nova Scotia Power has asked a number of questions to streamline, standardize, and optimize its maintenance strategies. Is there opportunity to reduce PM frequency? Is there opportunity to collect more information such that we can strengthen our APR models? Can our in-house standards be revalidated to sustainably reduce operating and maintenance costs? Nova Scotia Power is answering yes to these questions, and more, and pursuing opportunities to optimize its maintenance strategies—from the bottom up! 

Many asset-owning organizations engaging in enterprise digital transformations aren’t realizing the expected value. Follow the money and you’ll see asset-owning organizations spending tens of millions (sometimes hundreds of millions) of dollars and the only clear winners are the solution providers and supporting management consultants. Why? Some approaches can lead their organizations further away from achieving their business goals. Ambitious digital strategies are great, but success is best achieved through technology and first-principles practices and decision-making. Paul Daoust will explore a digital transformation strategy that combines technology with asset management and operational excellence practices into an integrated operational management framework that works.

"Who’s on first. What's on second. And I don’t know's on third!" For some, these three simple sentences, which begin with questioning words but don't end with question marks, will appear puzzling. To others, this nostalgic phrase will trigger a grin as they're reminded of the famous 1938 radio play by Abbott and Costello. Regardless of your reaction, these sentences represent a strikingly large gap in asset management, maintenance management, project management, program management, and other domains that leave practitioners feeling confused and infuriated. Who is the real sponsor of the work? What, exactly, is the sponsor supposed to do? And, do we know if the sponsor is the same as the asset manager? Guidance surrounding the role of a sponsor is rather dismal and unstructured while the amount of literature on roles such as maintenance planners, schedulers, reliability professionals, and project managers is overwhelming. Why does such a vacuum exist? This session will provide a framework for the duties of a sponsor and guidance to asset and maintenance practitioners on recognizing a good sponsor or surviving a bad one. We'll demonstrate why the sponsor is not only important for success, but also essential; how the sponsor can best support asset management and maintenance management professionals through asset lifecycles; and the skills and behaviours sponsors should exhibit to ensure the "right" work is being sanctioned.

Even today, many organizations see maintenance as a necessary evil neglecting the importance it has toward attaining optimum business results. These organizations have maintenance managers, supervisors, and technicians who are responsible for the preservation of their physical assets. Upon talking to and sharing experience with many maintenance colleagues in various countries, I've learned that most maintenance supervisors and managers don't have a formal maintenance educational background, yet they must make important decisions regarding assets affecting their business's bottom line. We learn about maintenance the hard way, learning from equipment failures and guessing how to avoid them by applying what has resulted well in the past and what the equipment manufacturer tells us. When organizations realize they must do something about maintenance to improve their business bottom line, they're exposed to a lot of information about many tools boasting to offering what they need to do better. This presentation will showcase the results of various case studies performed by our consulting firm at crude oil pumping, pharmaceutical, and water treatment organizations located in North and South America. Several methodologies ranging from Uptime (Strategies for Excellence in Maintenance Management) to RCM-R, ACA, RCA, and even PdM were used to tackle situations at the strategic, tactic, and operational levels.

Many organizations have implemented processes and tools to collect data to facilitate informed decision-making. Often, they will seek out best practices and measures to assist in decision-making or rely on technology to guide their basis. In many cases, however, these same organizations approach a gap in tactical deployment and in the ability to draw a connection to the follow-up or pre-emptive actions required to derive value from assets. We'll review the processes for establishing a framework for alignment and priority setting while looking at the techniques used for resiliency and risk management using a technology-agnostic approach. We'll review potential data sources that can be leveraged for decision-making and can reflect the needs and current state of the business environment. Additionally, we'll discuss the relationship and application to the decision-making process.  

Airports are an important economic hub for a region. They help regional economies extend their reach and often create a localized cluster of companies around it, termed “airport cities.” Indeed, airports face many of the same challenges that municipalities do. They have a portfolio of diverse infrastructure that supports a variety of services to customers in a challenging, dynamic environment. There are many stakeholders who have an interest in service levels, and revenues are often less than what is required to meet expectations. Edmonton International Airport (EIA) has implemented an asset management program that began with the successful implementation of a computerized maintenance management system to better understand its cost of service. It has also recently established an asset management strategy that systematically employs risk, strategic goals, and service priority for investment decision-making. This presentation will provide a case study of EIA's progress to date as well as future steps.

The U.K. railway network dates back to 1825 and is the oldest railway in the world. Several electrical assets on the network such as track power cables, switchgears, overhead line isolators, circuit breakers, and insulators are beyond their design life and the business must decide whether to renew or replace them—even though they're still operating at the optimum performance level. These assets are still being maintained at the original regimes; the challenge to the business is to understand the degradation models and change them to achieve different maintenance regimes for the aging assets. The work we're currently undertaking is intended to influence and change our asset policies—in particular, the assignment of asset regimes for assets that remain in service at the end of their design life and beyond. The philosophy behind the maintenance regimes is that they're based on degradation models, which are algorithms that consider various factors such as the environment, the loading, the utilization, the reliability, and the cost for interventions. The approach we pursued was to review the parameters of the degradation models for their “fit,” based on the knowledge asset managers have gained on the ground and through large volumes of asset data. The asset data was analyzed with data visualization software to gain further insight to influence the review of the degradation models. The findings of the work are summarized here: asset population is aging and future renewals bow wave are predicted; asset policy pushes all assets to maximum asset technical life and fix-on or run-to failure; safety-related works prioritized over asset performance/resilience; there's a need to modify some factors associated with the degradation models to cater for extension of technical asset life and maintain a more realistic/sustainable asset renewal profile; composite asset condition scores are required to manage bow wave of asset renewals and implement sustainable obsolescence management techniques (this is predominantly driven by organizational investment decisions where enhancements are the main driver of asset acquisition, making future renewals difficult due to the requirement to renew similar age assets at the same time); and determination of useful asset life required for assets that are being left in service longer than their originally predicted life.

-Introduction a la gestion d’actifs véhiculaires-Processus intégré de la gestion d’un parc d’actifs véhiculaires-L’analyse du cycle de vie financier-Performance de l’actif-Questions et conclusions 

Early in 2018, the City of Edmonton adopted an Infrastructure Asset Management Policy to provide clear direction for how the organization should carry out asset management activities to achieve its vision, goal, and objectives. Infrastructure maintenance at the Parks and Roads Services Branch is accountable for all the actions necessary. In order to comply with the recently adopted policy, the branch developed an asset maintenance framework that would allow the section to not only align its practices to the adopted policy but also enable it to manage resource allocation; define clear accountability for financial results as well as for level of services delivered to citizens; and set the foundation for a management system that will allow performance-based reporting on how the execution of the different types of maintenance activities defined in each asset maintenance plan are supporting the expected asset condition levels targeted by the administration.