05 Maintenance & Reliability Engineering

In early 2014 a large Canadian owned mine approached Toyo looking for input on reducing down time and operating costs at one of their primary slurry feed stations.  Existing slurry pumps were lasting three weeks. Annual operating costs exceeded $400,000 on this one pumping application. This session shares Toyo's assessment methodology and the resulting custom built pump with a patent applied for pressurized sealing system. The pump was put on trial and ran for 26 weeks - an 800 % improvement in operating time and estimated annual operating costs reduced by a factor of six. Learn more about how the pressurized seal system helps ensure clean oil across the mechanical seal faces extending pump life and maintenance requirements dramatically. 

Reliability Block Diagrams (RBD) help organizations achieve new project goals which makes them an especially important tool under the restriction of budget and production cuts that are currently typical due to economic constraints such as low oil prices. At design stages and under new budget cuts, management should consider a few things besides meeting the projects budget like: New plant capacity expected; Plant overall reliability and availability; Operating risks; and Projected maintenance costs. Participants will see that by building an RBD the project team will have a document that will help in the decision making while supporting both in production and economic terms a decision. 

Today, leaders of organizations are stretched to do more with less. They are asked to cover more areas with fewer resources, with less time and smaller budgets. Given these constraints, how can we continue to drive improvement and achieve success? We must focus tactically to drive improvement and eliminate issues that impact our ability to perform. In this session participants will see how focused improvement efforts can provide significant bottom line impacts and be sustained after the project. Learn how chronic and persistent reliability issues can be solved using a targeted Process Performance OptimizationSM (PPO) approach that integrates best practices in change management, lean and asset management. In order to effectively drive PPO, organizations should focus on this four-step approach along with weaving in an appropriate level of change management to sustain the gains.

The evolution of Preventive Maintenance (PM) is based on analyzing equipment operating conditions, its criticality to production and maintenance cost. In this case study, participants will see the journey starts with setting safe PM schedule and parts stock to sustain production. Then root causes of failures are analysed, and plans for improvement are launched. Learn how plans-in-action should be supported by motivating everyone to the expected achievement. Ahmed will share that implementation is not the end of journey - it is where we need to evaluate whether we landed on the right solution from all aspects. He will also show that sometimes, touch ups are needed. Participants will see the real journey of RajhiSteel, started with a greenfield mini mill 8 years ago. See real examples of doing more than PM in the harsh environment of steel melting Electric Arc Furnace (EAF) and its specific equipment as Water Cooled Cables (WCC).

In the face of global competition organizations must innovate to achieve their strategic goals as cost effectively as possible. In this session hear how the BHP Billiton Maintenance and Improvement team worked to validate the capability of the world’s biggest greenfield potash project. Using key pillars such as: asset management plan aligned with business goals, reliability design, maintainability by design, work management implementation plan, and asset care strategy development, this team unlocked new horizons of effective development for reliability and maintainability professionals. Thinking outside the box, using common and accessible tools, while determining the best stage each method should be implemented has been key to the team’s success.

While leadership often requests a business case for implementing a comprehensive Maintenance & Reliability Readiness (M&RR) Plan for a specific capital project, it can be difficult for M&R practitioners to build one. And many plans do not consider the value destruction that occurs in the majority of new capital projects accounting for approximately 9% per $1B invested. This session discusses the causes for this loss:  buying excessive new capital spares; reduced and/or intermittent production during the ‘ramp-up’ phase, and much higher annual maintenance expenses. By understanding the loss in value that can be avoided through the adoption of a comprehensive M&RR Plan, maintenance and reliability practitioners will be able to effectively communication a business case for an M&RR investment.

In this session you will learn about faster identification of defects at all stages of the asset life cycle, and about clearer and more effective mechanisms for preventing equipment defects at each stage in cycle. In addition you will discover how organizations implement better triggering mechanisms for initiating root cause analysis and integrate a business process and information linkages model. You will have a better understanding of different root cause analysis techniques, as well as data inputs and outputs for defect elimination.

Are you rolling the dice when it comes to managing Operational Risks? In an industrial setting, physical plant systems are the primary revenue generators and where the consequences of failure can be catastrophic - reliability is serious business. A standard practice for minimizing the overall risk exposure associated with system failure is to apply a redundancy philosophy — or a Duty/Standby Philosophy. Does your organization have a duty/standby philosophy? How does it address risks, safety and optimum life cycle costs associated with plant systems? In this presentation learn about the well-known 50:50 philosophy used in industry. This will be followed by a case for higher reliability by providing a qualitative argument for moving away from the conventional 50:50 practice of managing systems in such an arrangement.

Starting with a basic description of the multiple causes of failures, this workshop will emphasize the physical causes and explain how over 85% of all mechanical failures can be solved in the field with minimum complex testing. After a discussion of the metallurgy of common motor and equipment shafts, we will discuss the difference between brittle and ductile materials and how to diagnose whether the failure force was from overload or fatigue. We will delve into diagnosing the specific causes of the failures and look at a series of examples, both with slides and with hands-on pieces. In addition, a series of fastener failures will be reviewed.

In 2012, Water launched a comprehensive program (Secondary Water Supply Facilities Rehabilitation Program) which included assessing the condition of 18 pump stations. The results of this program ranked the Shaganappi Pump Station as the most critical based on the condition of the equipment, the relatively large population and number of critical institutions it services. In this session you will learn how this pump station effectively implemented a condition-based maintenance strategy, and how you can utilize some of the learnings in your own environment to minimize and control risk, and create an effective infrastructure.