3.05 Maintenance Delivery

How can we be sure our efforts to correct deficiencies are going to derive value for our organization? How many times have we carried out a root cause analysis only for the same problem to pop up somewhere else—obviously, we didn’t address all of the causes. The physical ones, we’re pretty good at, but when it comes to systemic problems, we consistently miss out. Even worse is when we spend a lot of effort solving an issue only to find that it didn’t amount to much. Do we fully understand that our area of focus is the right one? Why is it many times we deal with symptoms and wonder why the problems recur. What is preventing us from dealing with the true causes of our problems? In this session we’ll look at tools that will point us in the right direction and figure out how we can develop them. We’ll look at the standard approaches to arriving at root cause and some that don’t work. Identifying systemic causes seems to provide the best results—why, and why don’t we bother to reach them? Finally, we’ll find the link between a horse’s rear end and the Space Shuttle Challenger, because if we can’t understand the links right in front of us, adding value may be impossible.

Asset management processes are becoming more widely adopted across industrial facilities. In this presentation, we’ll examine an essential aspect of the overall process—asset health—to understand the value of using data-centric models and how asset health enables fact-based decision-making at the asset and asset class levels across the enterprise. As a part of Intelligent Operations—a new approach to achieve Operational Excellence—asset health today uses digital transformation to optimize production, minimize equipment downtime, enhance human performance, and manage operational risks. We’ll examine the key asset-related aspects of Intelligent Operations and explore an asset health strategy based on the principles of interoperability and real-time decision support. Outcomes supported include reduced maintenance costs, enhanced asset availability, changes to predictive repair and capital replacement strategies, improved production, and reduced risk.

New technologies regularly enter the world of asset management (AM), often leveraging new inventions, which, in turn, are driven or supported by other advances such as computing power and big data handling. Such is the case for Motion Amplification, a new technology impacting crucial aspects of vibration analysis, machinery and structural troubleshooting, root cause analysis, and communications. This presentation will outline which areas of AM are impacted so we can have a road map facilitating the integration of the new tool into a global strategy and get an overall picture of the impacts it will have. We’ll also provide a brief technical introduction and some practical illustrations.Originally presented at MainTrain 2020

In our increasingly digitized and networked environment, the expectations for excellence in asset management are ever growing. While an abundance of maintenance and sensor data have become available, companies must develop the proper application of the data in their maintenance strategies. In this presentation, we’ll discuss the potential of your operational and maintenance data in the context of asset management, and explore different machine learning (ML) algorithms and how they may be leveraged to unleash hidden patterns in your asset management strategies. We’ll introduce some foundational topics required for ML, such as the taxonomy and data preparation steps critical to all ML approaches, the probability and statistics supporting ML, and how the evaluation of the quality of our models. C-MORE has actively applied machine ML methods to interesting real-world problems, such as the categorization of power generation units according to reliability characteristics, and anomaly detection in linear assets to optimize required maintenance actions. We’ll share a few of our case studies so participants can experience how ML methods can be used in maintenance, reliability and operations.

There is much literature on work sampling studies—from useful to not useful. Useful if the studies are done properly, and dangerous if not properly done, which happens more often than not. This presentation will dispel the myths about wrench time by addressing some old-fashioned concepts and strategies that work, just like the kind you would find in classic Western movies, where the heroes have a clear vision, develop strategies and plans, take action, and don’t let obstacles get in the way. The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly was set during the American Civil War, where three men were determined to find $200,000 in Confederate gold coins that was ambushed by Yankees and buried in a remote southwest cemetery. But where is the value of finding gold in performing work sampling studies? That’s why you need to round up the horses, get the campfire lit, and settle in for an entertaining hands-on, informative presentation to learn about the good, and bad, and the ugly of work sampling studies to measure wrench time. Dennis Heinzlmeir has led 12 work sampling studies across Canada at various industrial facilities. He will reveal the results to support that when studies are completed in the right manner, they offer valuable benchmarks to organizations that lead them to drive down maintenance costs and increase uptime through continuous improvements. Ineffectiveness and inefficiencies can creep into a company’s work management process; having this health check can save millions of dollars. Just like a Western’s happy ending, this presentation will address the many misconceptions, misunderstandings, and myths about wrench time. Measuring wrench time is a very effective means of improving productivity if it’s done with a focus on removing obstacles and frustrations that prevent maintenance work from being completed efficiently and effectively.

Maintenance of critical assets and life safety infrastructures is extremely important. Therefore, significant precautions and risk analysis should be given to the potential effects of human errors during preventive and corrective maintenance, including bypass requirements, deactivation of system, and the expected impact of the failure on the program operation. Unanticipated or unplanned downtime is costly, negatively impacts building operation, and often impacts an organization’s reputation and brand. For planned activities (preventive or corrective), it’s important to proactively document the scope of work and identify potential problems that could occur so that risks are managed and all stakeholders are aware of them. This presentation contains a real-life application that will provide the basis to improve the future of your maintenance organization and prevent future downtime. The permit-to-work process is a real-world best practice to help improve communications, manage risk in your organization, keep your critical infrastructure running, and minimize productivity loss or damage due to unplanned downtime. We’ll provide an overview of the permit-to-work procedure and its associated risk assessment and mitigation protocol. There are seven learning objectives: evaluating maintenance performance; reducing or eliminating human errors; improving stakeholders’ engagement; enhancing interdepartmental communications; focusing on culture change by leveraging risk management tools; enhancing critical equipment reliability by reducing potential downtime; building a staff-vendor-client relationship by implementing clear expectations; and protecting your critical assets and reputation by minimizing unplanned downtime.

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.

Even under normal circumstances, most of us have difficulty finding the time to do what we need to do – under these uncertain times it is exponentially harder. What can count on in one month, two months – even two days? For those organizations who are still up and running and for those hoping to come back up and hit the ground running – there are definite challenges. In this discussion we will look at these challenges and hopefully give you some hints to help decide – what can be deferred and how you can keep that to the minimum.

The asset hierarchy is often thought of as a way to organize assets so they’re easy to find in the CMMS. While a well-structured asset hierarchy does make work management easier, it’s much more than that. The asset hierarchy, when well conceived and utilized, will ensure the right reliability and costing data can be extracted from the CMMS. This enables more than just micro improvements in reliability involving a single asset; instead, it enables macro views of reliability and cost trends across the entire organization. Setting up an asset hierarchy to support these types of activities requires forethought and planning, but by following some guidelines, any organization can be set up for success. First, the asset hierarchy must have a standard that identifies how all assets will be categorized and described, and the specific data required for each asset class. This is vital, as not all assets warrant the collection of specific data, reducing the burden of the setting of the hierarchy. As assets are categorized, the failure code library can be developed and linked to the specific asset classes. This ensures only relevant failure codes are displayed for the assets, improving the adoption of failure data collection. With the asset hierarchy built and relevant failure data collected, trends can be established across asset classes, similar processes, etc. The trends enable reliability improvements to be implemented across larger swaths of assets, providing rapid improvements in reliability. This presentation will provide guidance in how to develop an effective asset hierarchy based on ISO 14224, how to implement the changes in the CMMS, and finally how to leverage the asset hierarchy to identify macro trends. Without a proper asset hierarchy, any organization will struggle to get meaningful and actionable data from their CMMS to drive reliability.

This article is to address the difference in conditional probability of failure patterns, and the impact on how best to maintain assets based upon those differences.