03 Asset Strategy Management

This Project was established to review all facets of Maintenance within the St Lawrence Seaway Management Corporation (SLSMC) with a goal to improve productivity, maintaining a positive impact on maintenance staff moral and provide the same or increased equipment reliability. Maintenance Programs were reviewed for all major assets and analyzed using subject matter experts leveraging the FMECA (Failure Mode, Effects & Criticality Analysis) tool to determine areas of vulnerability within the assets ability to perform at the designed operational level Maintenance Processes were analyzed using some of the Lean Six Sigma and Work Measurement tools with focus on the six (6) steps of Work Management Cycle (Identify, Plan, Schedule, Assign, Execute and Learn) to get a better understanding of the problem areas and generate solutions to this issue backed by actual results. Work Organization main focus was to improve Supervisory awareness and availability in providing support to trades employees and conducting regular field audits to ensure accuracy and quality of task execution. Investigations and work process flow analysis are also planned for individual Trade Shops and Warehouse Facility Layouts to improve work space planning and component/part inventories. Change Management focus was on Vision Mapping, Stakeholder Analysis, Communication Planning and transition coordination of all improvements and changes that will affect the entire organization during the progression of each stage of the project. The findings of the project to date showed that there were a lot of excess maintenance tasks being performed on managed assets. The estimated labour times for task completion, travel and delay inefficiencies of work tasks being performed were excessive and daily performed tasks contained value and non-value activities over all process steps of the Work Management Cycle. All findings discovered and work that continuous to be performed at each stage of this project confirms that there is a lot of variability, inefficiencies and opportunities for improvements within all facets of the Maintenance within the Organization.

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! 

Enbridge Liquids Pipelines is at the midpoint of a multi-year journey to advance the M&R program for its electrical and mechanical assets. This presentation will share successes and challenges while aiming to apply M&R best practices to a midstream pipeline operator. Our initiative will improve M&R processes and culture, with a focus on improving multiple work streams. These include the planning, scheduling, and execution of preventative and predictive maintenance, information management, spare parts, and CMMS use.

The desert-bound city of Chandler in the American Southwest operates a municipal infrastructure that includes aging machinery assets at four water treatment facilities and dozens of potable water wells, recharge wells, and pumping stations. The city hired an expert— who happens to be an ICML-certified lubrication technician and oil analyst—to develop predictive maintenance programs intended to extend the reliability and service life of these assets. Though his proposed solutions will take several years to implement fully across the board, the benefits and efficiencies have been felt almost immediately. In this presentation,we’ll provide an overview of the main water treatment facility’s lubrication conditions prior to the expert’s arrival and describe the challenges he regularly faces with regard to environmental conditions, untrained vendors, and corporate culture—even as he harvests low-hanging lubrication fruit within the scope of his broader predictive maintenance mandate. We’ll also highlight his personal emphasis on the valuable role that training and certification play in his program’s success. You’ll understand that best lubrication and oil analysis practices can produce significant ROI for any machinery maintenance program; training and certification contribute greatly to the sustainability of culture change and new processes; and a strategic road map can make implementation more efficient and sellable from the outset.

Oftentimes, maintenance is left to suffer the consequences of otherwise “successfully” completed and handed-over projects. While project teams are more interested in the project constraints of scope, time, and cost at handover, maintenance is concerned with maintainability, reliability, availability, cost, and safety for the duration of the asset lifecycle. This conflict is not often given due consideration, and maintenance is often brought into the team long after the asset has been commissioned and handed over to operations. This presentation will make a strong case for including maintenance at all stages of a project—a case for maintenance readiness. It describes the slowly changing paradigm shift and acceptance (albeit lukewarm) of operations readiness, with no corresponding consideration to maintenance readiness. It uses real-life examples to show that the "cost savings" from not including maintenance in projects is mostly eroded in the first few months of the asset lifecycle. We'll make the case for a paradigm shift toward including maintenance readiness to all projects. Inserting the maintenance team in all the project phases will not only improve asset availability, reliability, and lifecycle cost, but also enhance cross-functional team synergy and professionalism, and ultimately reduce this stress element from maintenance.

Even today, many organizations see maintenance as a necessary evil neglecting the importance it has toward attaining optimum business results. These organizations have maintenance managers, supervisors, and technicians who are responsible for the preservation of their physical assets. Upon talking to and sharing experience with many maintenance colleagues in various countries, I've learned that most maintenance supervisors and managers don't have a formal maintenance educational background, yet they must make important decisions regarding assets affecting their business's bottom line. We learn about maintenance the hard way, learning from equipment failures and guessing how to avoid them by applying what has resulted well in the past and what the equipment manufacturer tells us. When organizations realize they must do something about maintenance to improve their business bottom line, they're exposed to a lot of information about many tools boasting to offering what they need to do better. This presentation will showcase the results of various case studies performed by our consulting firm at crude oil pumping, pharmaceutical, and water treatment organizations located in North and South America. Several methodologies ranging from Uptime (Strategies for Excellence in Maintenance Management) to RCM-R, ACA, RCA, and even PdM were used to tackle situations at the strategic, tactic, and operational levels.

Companies are continually faced with competing priorities and limited resources, and, as a result, it's critical to drive value from the business decisions they make. With more focus on asset management principles, these decisions must be justified through demonstrated and quantified value to the business. With complex systems of equipment, such as a pipeline, determining the value of a project or proposed improvement can often be difficult to estimate—especially when considering an asset's lifespan. In such cases, a more systematic, data-driven approach may be required to predict value. RAM models are one such tool that can be used to achieve this. In this case study, we'll look at how RAM models have been developed and used at Enbridge Pipelines to identify and quantify the risks to throughput volume. The models include key equipment and operational events, along with specific throughput impacts and simulated long-range demand forecasts in order to prioritize the risks and focus resources toward capturing the best opportunities. When specific improvement opportunities (e.g., additional equipment sparing) are identified, alternate cases of the model can be created and the results compared to the base case to support decisions and justify projects. We'll explore some of the challenges we encountered during development and highlight examples of how this tool is being used to quantify value, as well as the approach taken to disseminate the information within the organization.

One major challenge at the operate and maintain phase of an asset is achieving and sustaining the forecasted availability and reliability as intended at the project delivery phase. Many problems arise—equipment failures, underperformance, high costs—that are caused by numerous issues. The resolution demands thorough understanding of the causes of the issues, which we usually attempt to achieve through RCA methodologies. I've experienced many repeated failures even when RCAs have been conducted, due, mainly, to most of the RCAs focusing attention on solutions to the problem outcomes with limited focus on the human and system causes that drive the outcomes. The Causal Learning Approach brings in the understanding of these other causes that ensure effective and sustainable solutions development. There are three levels of causes: the physical outcomes; the human causes; and the system causes. The Causal Learning Approach also focuses on causal reasoning instead of defensive and solution reasoning. This presentation will provide the understanding of these causes and the three key elements of this approach: discovery, learning, and solution generation.

Any plant, in order to maximize its production, must have a world-class maintenance team that takes care of every single piece of equipment in the field. Maintenance teams could be considered the superheroes of any plant, since they must always maintain and return the equipment in the fastest and most efficient way. Wrench time is the actual time a maintenance crew works on a piece of equipment, and wrench time analysis is used to measure the maintenance team's effectiveness. Many companies apply wrench time for a very limited time and do not go for a continuous way of study. This presentation will show a self-reporting wrench time case study that was implemented in a Saudi Arabian petrochemical plant. We'll aim to explore the effect of self-reporting wrench time and answer the following three questions: Does wrench time analysis increase maintenance efficiency? Does self-reporting wrench time lead to better maintenance efficiency? What is the impact of self-reporting wrench time on maintenance team performance?

-Introduction a la gestion d’actifs véhiculaires-Processus intégré de la gestion d’un parc d’actifs véhiculaires-L’analyse du cycle de vie financier-Performance de l’actif-Questions et conclusions