09 Information Management

We’re currently rolling out an Asset Integrity Management System (AIMS) across our terminal network, which consists of nine terminals across Canada and the U.S. We’re publishing 27 new standards as part of this initiative that cover a variety of topics such as risk assessment, inspection planning, recordkeeping, data management, and relevant codes, standards, and regulations. This presentation will focus on the training and rollout of this program and will highlight some of the lessons learned. Some of the challenges include providing training to a group that spans a large geographical area, having a wide variety of stakeholders who require different levels of knowledge about the program (operations, project management, document control, contractors, management), and ensuring training is effective and leads to a smooth adoption of the changes that come with the new standards. Some of the topics we’ll cover include using the ADKAR model of change management to evaluate how effective your training will be; awareness of the need to change; desire to support and participate in the change; knowledge of how to change; ability to implement required skills and behaviours; reinforcement to sustain the change; tailoring presentations to specific groups; creating short and long versions of modules—building blocks for presentations; tailoring presentations to each group based on required knowledge; having a one-hour “crash course” presentation to give a quick overview to certain groups (upper management, those not directly impacted by standards); giving several opportunities for questions to ensure any potential issues are identified early (standard review, training, pre-publishing); and some tips on encouraging engagement: examples and exercises (real world), visual aids (flowcharts, photos, graphics over text), handouts (quick reference guide, poster, contact sheet, acronym list), and summaries (standard review sheets, single-page overviews).

Too often we hear the struggle of not being able to get the information that is required out of the system. It's like the data has disappeared into a big black hole. Maintenance Staff get frustrated in having to feed a system that is difficult to use and time consuming for what is perceived as little or no benefit. This discussion details what a CMMS can do and how best to realize the benefits from using a CMMS. There are a number of critical success factors in managing your CMMS including:• Organization policies and objectives• staff turnover• training• reduced staffing• database review audits• outdated software

Asset management processes are becoming more widely adopted across industrial facilities. In this presentation, we’ll examine an essential aspect of the overall process—asset health—to understand the value of using data-centric models and how asset health enables fact-based decision-making at the asset and asset class levels across the enterprise. As a part of Intelligent Operations—a new approach to achieve Operational Excellence—asset health today uses digital transformation to optimize production, minimize equipment downtime, enhance human performance, and manage operational risks. We’ll examine the key asset-related aspects of Intelligent Operations and explore an asset health strategy based on the principles of interoperability and real-time decision support. Outcomes supported include reduced maintenance costs, enhanced asset availability, changes to predictive repair and capital replacement strategies, improved production, and reduced risk.

In our increasingly digitized and networked environment, the expectations for excellence in asset management are ever growing. While an abundance of maintenance and sensor data have become available, companies must develop the proper application of the data in their maintenance strategies. In this presentation, we’ll discuss the potential of your operational and maintenance data in the context of asset management, and explore different machine learning (ML) algorithms and how they may be leveraged to unleash hidden patterns in your asset management strategies. We’ll introduce some foundational topics required for ML, such as the taxonomy and data preparation steps critical to all ML approaches, the probability and statistics supporting ML, and how the evaluation of the quality of our models. C-MORE has actively applied machine ML methods to interesting real-world problems, such as the categorization of power generation units according to reliability characteristics, and anomaly detection in linear assets to optimize required maintenance actions. We’ll share a few of our case studies so participants can experience how ML methods can be used in maintenance, reliability and operations.

With many people at home either due to the closure of their operations, self-isolation protocols, or as a proactive measure to reduce non-essential staff on site, some might question how these individuals can be productive, particularly when assets are not operating. However, if employees have access to their CMMS/EAM/ERP data systems from home, here are some value-added activities that employees and employers should consider undertaking given the time they now have. Note these are in no particular order as priorities would be context-specific, and specific procedures are omitted for this same reason. 

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.

Previous presentations regarding the City of Toronto’s journey in Enterprise Work Management Solution deployment discussed the requirements gathering process and methodology for ensuring alignment within the service delivery group as well as across the municipality with other project partners. This presentation outlines the project’s current progress on moving from the program layer towards more specific divisional needs and the “readiness tasks,” which are required to ensure the meeting of critical milestones to realize deployment. Strategies focus on leveraging requirements documents for OCM and integration planning, with particular attention to engaging end users.

Many asset-owning organizations engaging in enterprise digital transformations aren’t realizing the expected value. Follow the money and you’ll see asset-owning organizations spending tens of millions (sometimes hundreds of millions) of dollars and the only clear winners are the solution providers and supporting management consultants. Why? Some approaches can lead their organizations further away from achieving their business goals. Ambitious digital strategies are great, but success is best achieved through technology and first-principles practices and decision-making. Paul Daoust will explore a digital transformation strategy that combines technology with asset management and operational excellence practices into an integrated operational management framework that works.

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.

Many organizations have implemented processes and tools to collect data to facilitate informed decision-making. Often, they will seek out best practices and measures to assist in decision-making or rely on technology to guide their basis. In many cases, however, these same organizations approach a gap in tactical deployment and in the ability to draw a connection to the follow-up or pre-emptive actions required to derive value from assets. We'll review the processes for establishing a framework for alignment and priority setting while looking at the techniques used for resiliency and risk management using a technology-agnostic approach. We'll review potential data sources that can be leveraged for decision-making and can reflect the needs and current state of the business environment. Additionally, we'll discuss the relationship and application to the decision-making process.