3.07 Asset Operations

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.

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! 

When entering a maintenance record into a CMMS, there's often a place where the operator can enter free-form comments. These comments may contain valuable information about the health of the equipment, any maintenance activities that were undertaken, and plans or recommendations for the future. The flexibility of the comments is attractive to operators, as a precise description of the observations can be recorded. However, using the comments information in data analysis usually requires some codifying of the comments, which is time-consuming and results in a loss of nuanced information. A machine learning approach to using comments data has been applied to predict the health of hydroelectric generating units. By embedding comments into a matrix to generate a "bag of words," and applying neural networks on the vocabulary, comments can be used to assess the current state of the asset and predict its next state. In this presentation, we'll discuss three machine learning algorithms in a way that's accessible and relevant to M&R practitioners: a classification method, a clustering method, and a neural network method. Each method will be partnered with direct applications to real-life maintenance problems, including lessons learned and potential uses in other contexts.

Metrics, best practices, more than 40 key elements to implement, challenges, and opportunities all combine to make a successful implementation difficult. Where do you start, and how do you know how to work on what matters? Once you understand how it’s all related, you can focus on the vital few to leverage the maximum ROI. This presentation will clarify the importance of culture and employee engagement, along with other key plant floor performance indicators that will be clarified with data. We'll look at the current state of R&M; what’s working and what's not; survival skills for the next decade; impacts of connected technologies (edge computing, big data, machine learning, AI, 3D printing, augmented reality); the importance of getting your data ready for what's coming next; and relationships between R&M and safety, people engagement, quality, throughput/uptime, and cost.

This webcast will highlight Potash’s extensive implementation of mobile devices to support its business processes. Aligned Mobile Applications are now in use or being implemented at Potash’s Allan, Augusta, Aurora, Geismar, Lanigan, Lima, Rocanville & Trinidad sites. Potash has partnered with Viziya to develop a single integrated mobile app to meet its maintenance and supply chain business requirements, and Postash continues to deploy ‘out of the box’ apps from its Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system. Vendor mobile devices are now a commodity which provide a cost effective way to drive efficiencies. Importantly, apps are available across various platforms; hardware choices do not drive decision making when it comes to selecting the best tools for our business. If you are thinking about implementing a shift to mobile devices on the front lines, this will be a great opportunity to learn from the Potash experience.   Reviewer's comments;  Excellent presentation outlining how Potash Corporation of Saskatchewan has deployed a combination of technologies, enabled on mobile devices (tablets / laptops) integrated fully with their EAM and KPI monitoring systems. Author provides an overview of the situation "before" deployment, through the deployment (which took place over several years) to the "after" or current state. If you want to know what can be done and has been done, this is pretty leading edge stuff and well worth the time to listen.

The Sheerness Generating Station, a large power plant, has process and machine health data feeding into the DCS and plant historian database continuously from thousands of field sensing elements. This session is a case study of project at the plant that utilized ‘cloud’ technology to stream data about plant performance and initial equipment failures not yet notified by the Alarm Management System, to technical experts, who analyzed the information and communicated the findings back to the plant for further troubleshooting, validation and correction. The session will describe the data security and connectivity issues, the communication protocols and the benefits observed. If you are considering changes in the collection, analysis, and reporting of your own plant performance and equipment health, this session will be useful.