2.00 Asset Management Decision Making General

To deliver value from our assets means organizations must manage cost, performance, and risk simultaneously. In practice, this is no easy task. Are there trade-offs? Sure, but seeking to balance breeds mediocrity. Can we optimize? Yes, the aim is to achieve higher service at a lower cost and acceptable risk. The magic CPR triangle provides a simple representation of a complex dynamic system that is constantly resolving itself to produce the results the organization deserves based on how well its assets are managed, or not. Join Paul Daoust as we challenge our perceptions of the fascinating relationship between cost, performance, and risk. Together we will apply the magic CPR triangle as a basis for crucial first principles thinking leading to more, better decisions, vastly improved business plans, and higher-value business outcomes from the same assets with fewer resources.

Let us look at an ordinary omnipresent part of Asset Management: bolting and fastening the machinery or structure. This single vital activity turns out to be remarkably neglected with undesirable consequences for reliability. Motion Amplification®, a new technology has the capacity to show machinery and structural movements, and so naturally brings out looseness or unnatural behaviors. Fastening errors seem to be one of the most prevalent occurrences and it is therefore important to look at what we can learn and how the technology can drive improvements and uses of best practices. A variety of problems are shown, such as forgotten difficult to access bolts, rusted/corroded fasteners, improper tension, improper washers, bolt grade or size and custom modifications such as a bunch of small shims. Some of the issues can be attributed to design errors, some to lack of asset information provided, some to installation errors, lack of training and proper tools or a culture of installation and maintenance excellence. Sometimes and improvement push comes with the integration of more advanced tools, for example tools exist where the torque can be properly managed. This requires that many other items come into place, such as the missing information, correct parts, training and cultural to get the job done properly.

Organizations have a performance metric for productivity measured as cost per unit produced, or sometimes called unit cost or cost of service. In operations, we recognize we can affect the numerator with how well we manage our costs, and we can affect the denominator with how much we can produce. What is Super-Productivity? We define Super-Productivity as the sum of all the bad over the sum of all the good. As a leader, if you really want agency over all your organization’s activities and you desire operationally excellent results, then you must reflect all the opportunity costs your organization has been blind to in the measure of productivity. Is your organization courageous enough to see yourself in that light? Few are. Here’s what it takes. Join Paul Daoust as we challenge our perceptions on the fascinating relationship between cost, performance and risk. Together we will apply these concepts to asset-intensive organizations to enable more, better decisions, vastly improved business plans and higher value business outcomes from the same assets with fewer resources.

The Organization-Wide Physical Asset Management (OWPAM) Approach is an interactive session to explore the asset management landscape and to help asset management practitioners and organizations on their path to implementing an organization-wide physical asset management system. Ask anyone in your organization individually and you’ll hear that each is doing a great job. However, when you bring all those individuals together and ask the same question again, you’ll most likely get a different answer. Traditionally, physical asset management systems have always been silo-based in organizations. The effects of those silos have significant implications creating gaps and overlaps in business processes and impeding the decision-making process. Managing physical assets by nature is a co-operative and cross-functional discipline to realize maximum value. What really creates value in physical asset management systems is the holistic approach, which is that every organization exists to provide value as a whole, through better co-ordination, collaboration, and alignment across functional areas. This OWPAM Approach session looks at the key physical asset lifecycle strategic and tactical activities involved in an organization-wide physical asset management system and prioritizes them to develop an implementation plan. Participants will interact with one another to understand the whole spectrum of strategic and tactical activities required for a holistic and organization-wide physical asset management approach; discuss physical asset management activities, how they apply to their organizational context, and how important they are from a whole lifecycle delivery perspective; identify ownership issues, gaps, and overlaps that could exist and that are critical for the successful implementation of physical asset management; and generate discussions around the implementation plan and priorities to meet organizational objectives and enable realization of maximum value.

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

One of the main developments in ISO 55000 is the expansion of the meaning of "asset" to include assets that are not plant and equipment assets (e.g., human, knowledge, or reputation assets). This aspect seems to be understated somewhat in explaining what's new in ISO 55000. To better understand the expanded asset concept in ISO 55000, this presentation will explain the "three axes model of assets"; demonstrate its application by contrasting two cases (plant and equipment in a nuclear plant vs. human assets in a nuclear plant); and explore knowledge assets in a professional trade organization (e.g., PEMAC). We'll suggest how professional trade organizations (like PEMAC) might manage their knowledge assets, which actually include both content (knowledge) and trainers (human). The results are twofold: an enhanced awareness of non-traditional assets in ISO 55000 and a basic proposed plan for a knowledge-based professional organization to manage its assets in keeping with ISO 55000.

"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.

As always, equipment maintainability plays an important role in uptime. Besides the reduction of failure rates, the quick recovery from those failures or the successful execution of scheduled activities makes a considerable difference in availability indicators. The application of Lean tools and Six Sigma analysis contributes to the improvement of maintenance execution by applying the 5 steps of Lean Six Sigma methodology (Define, Measure, Analyze, Implement and Control) and using the tools associated with them. This webcast will discuss Lean Six Sigma theory, basic principles of the methodology and case studies showing the use of tools. Case 1 will illustrate the application of Lean Six Sigma in scheduled preventive maintenance for slurry pumps operating in the oil sands industry. Case 2 will examine how the use of Six Sigma analysis reduced the corrosion rate of tubes in a bank of 12 heat exchangers shell and tube type, which heat diluted bitumen upstream of a distillation tower. Both cases emphasize the importance of using data and facts to make decisions, including front end personnel, and the sustainment of implemented solutions.

Ross Markowski was part of the final phases of construction of a gas plant that was experiencing a change of ownership. Ross used the Capstone Project and the myriad changes happening at his site as an opportunity to think through the possibilities of a new organizational design and leadership model to achieve site-wide engagement in proactive maintenance for the upcoming commissioning and operation of the plant. Ross’s presentation summarizes the pros and cons of the existing and proposed organizational structures and touches on some of the challenges of implementation.Whether you are in oil/gas, manufacturing, forestry or another industry, you will find the lessons learned through Ross Markowski’s Capstone Project applicable to most situations where changes are occurring, work still needs to planned and executed and people are your most important resource in getting the work done.

“Sustainability through reliability” — presented at the 2015 MainTrain Conference — focused on the rapid growth of passenger flow at Toronto Pearson Airport and how, due to this growth, we were experiencing a high number of plumbing drainage failures. We carried out an RCA on our system and came up with changes in how we would prevent drainage failures. The changes we made dealt with our plumbing design standards; food and beverage tenant fats; oil and organics recovery system; lease agreements; and maintenance practices. However, that was only the starting point. In this presentation, we’ll discuss RCA conducted, the failures experienced, and the enhancements and improvements we made to make our system more reliable.