02 Maintenance Program Mgmt

This presentation provides insight and guidance to key stakeholders, from leadership to shop floor, on why turnaround alignment is important. We will also explore the major causes of gaps and misalignment, including lack of understanding of the complexity of turnaround projects; integration of maintenance, operations, inspection, and capital work that occurs during a turnaround event; different perspectives of typical work vs. turnaround work; managing stakeholders’ focus on urgent vs. important; awareness of strategy and plans; and understanding of the true business impact of a turnaround. It’s important that all participants and stakeholders understand these alignment issues and implement measures to close the gaps early in their project. This will pay off exponentially when you execute your turnaround event.

Presentation highlights the importance and interdependency of three pillars of success (people, processes, and technology) and Cameco’s asset management improvement efforts through each of these, including lessons learned. Audience will learn about the importance of organizational change management, business process management and agile methodologies, some of the technologies supporting asset maintenance and reliability, and its new Asset Management & Reliability Center of Excellence.

Imagine your production facility as a 1950s pickup truck. It’s functional, but a lack of available parts, new regulatory standards, and an absence of modern sensors and electronics make diagnosing problems and improving performance difficult. Commissioned in 1954, Sherritt International Corporation faces many challenges characteristic of a classic car—challenges that not only include equipment lifecycles, but also human resources, software, workflows, and asset obsolescence. This case study will review the training, business process transformation projects, organizational design changes, and continuous improvement initiatives that Sherritt is implementing to modernize their work management processes. See how optimization of these processes have helped address the challenges presented by an aging site, and learn how projects were prioritized, which initiatives helped build organizational capability and improve performance, and what wasn’t worth the effort.

Within the mining industry, the library of KPIs has not kept up with data that has become increasingly available through digitization, therefore leading to an overuse of lagging performance indicators. Additionally, due to the fact that strategic corporate goals are oftentimes built on the basis of soft or perceptual measures from stakeholders, which are subjective in nature, organizations struggle with the process of linking strategic level goals to KPIs on the shop floor. Therefore, creating a communication gap between technical teams and senior management. As a consequence, maintenance leaders have a difficult time demonstrating the added value that maintenance activities create with an organization, leading to challenges in securing the resources required for things such as continuous improvement projects. Considering that the implementation of a robust KPI framework is an alignment of three key areas: people, process, and technology, the first portion of this presentation will be investigating a holistic approach to developing maintenance KPIs that are integrated into corporate strategic goals. Therefore, outlining the steps required for organizational leaders to begin standardizing data gathering procedures and creating a trustworthy system that can be leveraged for decision making. Aside from the previously discussed administrative challenges associated with data gathering within organizations, it must also be highlighted that KPIs are collected on a monthly or quarterly basis, meaning that training sets for forecasting models are extremely limited. Therefore, in order to address the reliance on lagging performance indicators within maintenance departments, a variety of time series models capable of achieving high accuracy on small datasets will be discussed along with direct business applications. Through achieving these goals, the intended outcome is to create a more contemporary data driven methodology for selecting organizational KPIs, as well as directly demonstrating the added value that the various business units create within the organization.

Recent developments in AI, ML and related techniques see wide adoption in many industries. However, in the asset management area, such technical advances are still in their infancy, especially in the maintenance, repair, and operations (MRO) area. Part of the reason is that, contrary to production, MRO data has its unique characteristics (e.g. incompleteness, inconsistency and heterogeneous), and most organizations are still planning to introduce diagnostic sensors dedicated to maintenance and equipment reliability. We face both challenges and opportunities in advancing data-driven continuous improvements within the asset management world. This presentation shares the findings of our current research and development focus. Titled “How to use historical data to find opportunities to improve the effectiveness of equipment reliability programs, optimize MRO inventory operations, and enhance MRO workflow management processes”, we will first examine the characteristics of MRO data as their uniqueness to a specific company, plant or equipment and their commonality across all sectors. Then we evaluate the feasibility of applying AI/ML techniques with MRO history for better operational efficiencies. We need to understand what data is related to human knowledge, human interaction and process, and what data is associated with the actual condition of the asset, and if there are patterns and models that can be learned. Last, we will demonstrate that AI/ML can find equipment agnostic models and patterns which help continuously improve MRO operations across different industries. Based on the findings, we will also show how AI/ML models learned from historical MRO data can be translated into prescribed actions for improvements in equipment reliability, MRO inventory and workflow operations for individual organizations.

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.     

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.

Within our toolbox of best practices, the concept of Operational Readiness (OR) has been discussed, strategized, budgeted, and engaged, to prepare the asset(s) in transition from OEM to start-up, whether for the construction of a single asset such as a mine haul truck, or unique piece of manufacturing equipment, or for multiple assets within an infrastructure such as a hospital, or rail transit line to create the smoothest, "turn key" process for the newly acquired asset, prior to deployment into operations.Through the many global industries, we have been blessed with a very holistic view of what Operational Readiness should look like. However, the process can be seen as a high level strategy, which fails to incorporate the depth and breadth required to ensure all steps of the plan will engage tactics which align with corporate vision and mission, supporting critical aspects of readiness; the tracking platform, communications, and follow up methods used to ensure we engage stakeholders as "partners" in our journey, rather than captives in a process to ensure the asset is truly "Operationally Ready", before we sign off with the asset owners.As a result, tactics used are many time absence of an accurate tracking process to ensure the highest level of QA/QC. What better time to achieve this accuracy then at the inception of the new asset, just like we do when we welcome a new baby into our family. But can we honestly say we plan everything for our new addition? Definitely not.  We can agree, that we are not all aligned in how or what we will feed our child when they turn 2 years old, rather we commit to the short term plan and move forward.Why? Simply put, it takes a lot of effort to "sweat the small stuff", however the tactics used for Operational Readiness, it is critical we "sweat the small stuff" as we build a platform that will support the process, while focusing on reduction of the 7 + 1 types of waste, and by making the process simple and attractive to the ones responsible for getting the process steps completed in our journey.An OR report study from Deloitte (2012) revealed that if a company can achieve OR process effectively, they would have an opportunity to reduce the risk of loosing 30% of their capital value. In addition, the severe detrimental impact on Capex and initial operational capacity, ongoing operations and maintenance costs over an asset’s lifecycle are typically 1 – 2% higher, year-on-year and for the entire life of the asset, where operational readiness was not sufficiently achieved at the outset.  And then there is value add for safety and employee morale.Everyone’s best intentions are traditionally met with the reality of how many small, yet critical alignment steps there are to truly set up the asset to be resilient and sustainable within the lifecycle and within the desired Asset Management Landscape within your organization.Chaos usually rears its ugly head at a period after the asset has been commissioned and signed off with the asset owner. Normally the front end of design for reliability, need vs. want, master maintenance plans, parts and operations, maintenance and training strategies are set well.  However, are they truly measured by the organization, in a way that supports the quality of work to manage QA/QC performance and excellence of each process step?  Many stakeholders will have touch points in the process; either one time, or many times well past the commissioning stage, right to the end of asset life; retire, restore or renewal process, which is all part of the OR.  In this presentation for the Operational Readiness (OR) Global Approach to Asset Management Landscape & Best Practices, the information will address how Agnico Eagle Mining Ltd., has taken the opportunity within the Nunavut Division,  Asset Management group to enhance the tracking performance and following up with every stakeholder to ensure the actual work is being performed, at the right time, for the right reasons and the completion of each of the hundreds of secondary and tertiary steps are properly aligning with the timing to bring the asset into operational state.The presentation will discuss the practice and "out of the box" applications readily available using the Microsoft 365 suite of programs, such as SharePoint and the supporting applications available, without engaging in complex processes, spreadsheets or software tracking, workflow, and communication platforms.  It is challenging to keep everything tracked and packaged in one system available to everyone when having to apply multiple CMMS, EAM, ERP, or other 3rd party application systems help to support the management of assets. 

An Asset Health Index or AHI refers to analysis performed using various asset data to determine the state or condition of the asset. AHI can be used to better assess asset condition, used and useful life, progression toward potential failure, and failure probability. Further, using AHI can also enable the development of optimized maintenance and replacement strategies for assets using a set of objective criteria to assess the true health of the asset. However, entities vary widely in whether they develop Asset Health Indexes (AHIs) for their key assets. For those that do, there are marked differences in the level of rigour and sophistication employed in developing and applying AHIs for effective asset management decision-making. AHI calculations involve identifying and collecting data which may include a review of core asset attributes such as manufacturer, inspection data including field observations, destructive and/or non-destructive test data, maintenance data including historical records, operational records, and asset failure/refurbishment data. In other words, some are core inventory data, some work records, and some inspections or tests. This presentation will go through how to make the best use of asset SMEs and how you can start to develop useful AHIs from what you already know/have. Technically, the process begins with identifying the most critical assets and determining which can best benefit from AHI formulation development. The next steps are used to develop proposed condition factors (CF) and weighting factors (WF) that provide insight into the condition of the assets. Finally, CFs and WFs are used to develop a mathematical algorithm or formulas for the Health Index. We will also discuss how AHI can be used to develop asset management and maintenance strategies – the whole point of the data and analysis in the first place.

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.