02 Maintenance Program Mgmt

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.

Studies have shown that asset performance is negatively impacted by the lack of an integrated operational readiness approach during the asset acquisition phase (or project). The resulting delays in reaching sustainable operating performance and anticipated service levels impact start-up dates, capital costs, operational revenues, lifecycle costs, customer satisfaction, organizational morale, and overall project NPV. These impacts often require large additional cost and labour injections to correct for the lack of an integrated operational readiness approach. There are a number of operational readiness asset management objectives to be focused on in parallel with the execution of a project—a must to enable any new asset, facility, or venture to meet business lifecycle targets. These prime focuses can be summarized as follows: develop capable people to safely operate, maintain, and support the project outcomes; ensure asset capability is developed and maintained in line with business requirements; implement and configure required supporting systems and business process; seamlessly manage the transition from project to operations; and ensure the engagement and alignment of the organization and all business stakeholders. This presentation will look at a number of mining, manufacturing, and public infrastructure case studies and show the benefits of using a structured approach to operational readiness during the acquisition phase of the asset lifecycle.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

How well is your MRO Stores system integrated with your maintenance requirements to ensure effective support of your organization’s maintenance efforts?Most of MRO stores efforts are to provide parts and materials to both Operations and Maintenance. For this article, the focus will be upon MRO stores support of Maintenance.