3.05 Maintenance Delivery

In service providing organizations, coordinating resources to minimize redundancy, manage cost to serve and combat employee disengagement becomes a differentiator. For larger organizations this can further support streamlined captial and operational investments such as facilities, speciality tooling and training. Within the maintenance industry we project that 35% of our trades persons time is actually on the tools (module 6), this is an alarming statistic that resonates with many professionals. Organizing resources intentionally, creating the customer experience while managing these investments can be achieved in a network strategy.  The network organizes resources between generalists and specialists and capitalizes on placing services that require specialization in labour markets that have depth. Organizing is only part of the equation,  having a comprehensive & fluid S&OP process and a mechanism (ex: a control tower) to bring real time visibility into capacity increases productivity and reduces overall cost to serve. At my organization, we have done just that. Beginning in 2019, we designed a hub and spoke model that would support a long term vision of creating capacity through strategic efficiency. This transformational pivot required considerable foresight, change management and Since the MRO articlehttps://www.mromagazine.com/digital-archives/september-2020/ (page 12) in 2020,  the focus on capturing internal & external demand signals to support the maturity of our capacity and capability (S&OP) planning,  we have been able to grow niche market shares by 300% in under 2 years. THe planning coupled with the increased/real time visbility through our contol tower has supported sustainable growth in an ever shifting economic climate.     

The Irving Pulp & Paper maintenance team was the recipient of the PEMAC Maintenance Team of the Year Award for 2021. The team was honored to be nominated based upon long term sustained performance improvements, professional development, controlling reactive maintenance and continuous improvement.

Reliability and Maintenance (R&M) teams at manufacturing facilities employ different maintenance strategies on their physical assets to achieve the desired reliability and maximize the availability of the assets. Most of the production downtime in manufacturing facilities is because of unexpected (or) random failures of equipment and the associated reactive maintenance work. One of the factors that affects the total time to fix failed equipment is spare parts availability. The increasing complexity to minimize production downtime with aging assets demands problem-specific decision models. In this study, a multi-criteria decision model is proposed to assist the R&M stakeholders at manufacturing facilities in making decisions on stocking the right parts. The proposed model will help facilities to stock the spare parts required to maintain the system with-in acceptable and manageable risk. Two case studies from a pulp mill will be presented to demonstrate the use of the proposed decision model. The first case study deals with “Pulp Machine Process Area” with historical data on equipment failures and spare parts usage while the second one focuses on a newly commissioned plant without failure information. The proposed decision model helped to identify the right parts to stock and minimized the risk and inventory costs in both cases.

This presentation is a holistic approach to precision machinery installation. We all know very well that the installation has direct impact on the performance and the operating life of the rotating equipment. In my presentation first I speak about the importance of standardization of the installation procedures based on existing standards such as API, ISO, NORSOK, ASME and ANSI. Second I speak about the importance of trainings in Installation procedures and the culture of teaching and sharing the knowledge among the team members including the suppliers. And finally the importance of documentation. The collection and transfer of data during the installation phase, though Commissioning and Site testing and then handing over the equipment to the Operations. I also provide a suggestion how to improve and optimize the installation work.

Maintenance Turnaround events involve major expenditures of time and money for any large continuous process plant. Without careful planning and preparation they can quickly and easily overrun their target cost and schedule. The larger and more complex the scope to be executed in the turnaround, the greater the risk is, of cost and schedule overruns. For this reason, it has, in recent years, become the norm for turnaround teams to use a “scope challenge” process, just before freezing the scope list. The purpose of the challenge being to review every work item and decide whether it should be in the scope of the turnaround event. Some of these “scope challenge” sessions can get quite sophisticated, involving a risk assessment, balancing the cost of doing the maintenance repair in the turnaround against the cost of doing it after a (probability weighted) breakdown during normal running. Many turnaround teams stop there, and assume that if they’ve had a “scope challenge”, then they’ve done what they can to optimize and control the scope. But more and more are beginning to realise that a “Risk Based Work Selection” Scope challenge session, while useful and necessary, is only one element in a process for choosing and controlling the work scope at an optimum level. This paper will describe a successful and more holistic approach, using scope control methods that start with the premise document (reference earlier article), include the scope gathering phase, go through the “Risk Based Work Selection” process and carry on to the “Additional Work Request” process after scope freeze. Along the way it will also discuss how to ensure that site leadership and plant operations staff “buy in” to the need to control the scope.

The energy landscape is shifting with the rise in electrification of transit and the rise of renewable energy shaping a new energy era that is changing the way we think about infrastructure decision making. This presentation will articulate how electrification of transit and an increase in renewables will impact medium and long-term infrastructure planning by providing examples and a practical perspective (case study) to demonstrate how Asset Management decision-making played a vital role in a utility company’s response to this change. This utility company is a key contributor to several electrification initiatives. They recognized the challenge associated with these initiatives and the overall success of the first implementation phase with minimal disruption to current operations. They are also preparing for electrification of the government transit’s first all-electric bus garage to support future procurements of battery-electric buses (eBuses) and will be working on the design and implementation of charging systems infrastructure across the city(?). Over the past 20 years, more than 50 renewable energy systems have been installed on City buildings and properties. In 2020, the city developed recommendations for the utility to achieve greater outcomes for energy efficiency, demand management, and renewable energy. The city also mandated installation of renewable energy systems on all buildings, where feasible, by 2020. The rate of development in electrification and technology in the transit sector is faster than implementation of major infrastructure developments; changes in demand patterns impact everything from the transmission and distribution networks to generation, dispatch and peak-load system capacity design; so it is not possible to “wait and see” before committing to infrastructure investment decisions. This presentation will cover how the utility is dealing with these changes by ensuring an appropriate long-term decision-making framework is in place to assure business continuity and reduce the impact on climate because it poses a particular risk for asset owners and operators. AMCL will present best practices for long-term decision-making and how the impact of change should be taken into account during the development of long-term infrastructure planning processes, in the context of a public utility.

We’ve all heard time and time again the value that Planning and Scheduling brings to a Maintenance organization. But, is your organization fully realizing this value? If Planning and Scheduling is intended to be a “wrench time multiplier” of you Maintenance Technicians, have you looked at the “wrench time” of your Planners and Schedulers? What are the potential barriers preventing them from achieving the ultimate goals of their roles? Can one Maintenance Planner really bring the same effective value as 15-17 tradespersons in your organization? Likely not, and it isn’t the fault of your Planners and Schedulers. In this presentation we’ll review the planning and scheduling function, define what it really is, and more importantly what it is NOT. We’ll also take a close look at many of the “value vampires” common in Planning and Scheduling that detract from the intended value generation. We’ll compare what an ideal Day-in-the-life of a Maintenance Planner should be against the realities they so commonly face. The intent of this presentation is to help you understand Why Planning and Scheduling is likely less effective than it could be in your organization. More importantly, this will hopefully trigger changes that help the Planners and Schedulers in your teams do more of what they do best.

The ultimate maintenance KPI must show if we are keeping assets from breaking and not just fixing them after they break. While our maintenance forces are responsible for fixing things that break, we have really failed in our primary mission to keep them working in the first place! In Six Sigma terminology, the ultimate maintenance KPI should be about eliminating defects. Emergency and urgent work requests are “defects.” How many do we have? Are we getting better at eliminating them? Simply put, that’s what it’s all about. Modern maintenance knows that the key to reducing emergency and urgent work orders is doing more proactive work such as PM, PdM, and project work to head off reactive work. However, because many plants are overwhelmed with reactive work, planning and scheduling are critical to help us complete the extra proactive work. We track and manage simple supporting planning and scheduling KPIs to achieve super-high productivity and quality of work. These easy-to-measure KPIs are schedule compliance, schedule loading, work order completion rate, planned coverage, creation of reusable job plans, keeping a minimal unplanned backlog, and amount of helpful feedbacks received.

Sharing a recent mandate with a mining client where we assessed the maturity of maintenance management. The webinar will also cover the findings and our actions for improvement.Approach   1. After dozens of interviews from trades to maintenance manager, from operators to supervisors, we started to gather an understanding of the situation.   2. Then, a thorough analysis was performed on work order history, PM percentage vs total available work hours, schedule compliance and production KPIs to help pinpoint several recurring issues.   3. The analysis was concluded with on-site shadowing of supervisors and trades. We selected key dates to execute day-in-the-life-of exercises (i.e., shutdown days) to assess the quality of shutdown management and observe the execution effectiveness. Actions in partnership Tool time is a powerful metric because it helps to expose the majority of the teams’ shortcomings: engagement of the team, respect of processes, communication between departments and productivity of all the maintenance members. After the assessment and analysis, we got to work:   1. Work management process   2. Maintenance tactics review     3. Maintenance execution   4. Spare parts analysis Results With a SWAT team approach, we reduced maintenance backlog by 20%, which allowed us to focus on high criticality assets. In less than 8 weeks, we started to see a reduction in major breakdowns of equipment. We started performing root cause analysis on each breakdown and defect elimination workshops to achieve better reliability. By reducing waste related to maintenance activities in planning & execution, the team managed to transfer the work hours toward preventive tasks. The actions got translated into an improved plant availability and higher engagement

Discussion Forum:Since 2001 ICML has maintained that its MLT, MLA, LLA, and MLE certifications are beneficial to hands-on lubrication practitioners and to their employers. Normally, a case study presentation would demonstrate such value with a before-and-after narrative that describes a specific plant’s successful journey to machinery lubrication excellence. Today, however, we thought it would be fun to put several of our certified professionals together and let them recount bits and pieces of their combined experiences in a free-flowing Q&A mashup, as they get to talk about how their own ICML credentials have helped them and their clients on various projects through the years.