10 Continuous Improvement

2020 was a challenging year for everyone, but in our facility, we were able to sustain the site reliability through the successful implementation of Total Productive Maintenance. Total Productive Maintenance allowed us to minimize equipment downtime throughout the year through the combination of keeping equipment in its base condition and producing clear operational and maintenance triggers to catch problems before they become in-process failures. The talk will go through the initial implementation phase (pre-lockdown) and how we navigated through internal and external challenges in 2020 to sustain the TPM and Reliability activities.

Written by a Certified Maintenance and Reliability Professional (CMRP) with more than three decades of experience, this resource provides proven planning and scheduling strategies that will take any maintenance organization to the next level of performance. The book resolves common industry frustration with planning and reduces the complexity of scheduling in addition to dealing with reactive maintenance. You will find coverage of estimating labor hours, setting the level of plan detail, creating practical weekly and daily schedules, kitting parts, and more, all designed to increase your workforce without hiring. Much of the text applies the timeless management principles of Dr. W. Edwards Deming and Dr. Peter F. Drucker. You will learn how you can do more proactive work when your hands are full of reactive work.  Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Handbook covers:   •The business case for the benefit of planning.   •Planning principles.   •Scheduling principles.   •Handling reactive maintenance.   •Planning a work order.   •Creating a weekly schedule.   •Daily scheduling and supervision.   •Parts and planners.   •The computer CMMS in maintenance.   •How planning works with PM, PdM, and projects.   •Controlling planning: the best KPIs KPIs for planning and overall maintenance.   •Shutdown, turnaround, overhaul, and outage management.   •Selling, organizing, analyzing, and auditing planning.           Palmers "Maintenance Planning and Scheduling Handbook" is listed a reference for Module 6 of the PEMAC  Maintenance Management Professionals (MMP) Program.

The Maintenance management Framework is intended to be used by members of the GFMAM, the Maintenance and Asset Management communities to:   Provide an overview of the discipline of maintenance management;   Provide a structure for the building of a body of knowledge for certification schemes and qualifications in maintenance management;   Provide a structure (and potentially the criteria) for assessing an organization’s maturity in maintenance management;   Provide information for maintenance management knowledge requirements for assessors and auditors;    Provide the capability to compare the products and services of the different GFMAM members related to maintenance management; andProvide a reference for future GFMAM projects.

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).

In 2010, a privately owned tissue-converting facility in New Brunswick (Irving Tissue) considered itself a well-oiled machine, being able to product 10 million cases of product annually—a huge leap forward from where it started in 1990, with 200,000 cases. The site was piloting a PMO on one of 12 production lines when a vision was pitched to the site leadership team: implementing PMO’s activities and principles on each production line would allow the site to streamline its efforts and result in increased production, with a higher product quality and fewer injuries. This pitch aligned with several of the company’s core values and allowed the leadership team to see there was still substantially more gains to be made at the facility that didn’t necessarily require capital investment, but simply changes to work processes. While this plan didn’t come to fruition, it aligned the leadership team to make reliability a focus rather than just production. This alignment paved the way for several reliability-centred improvement initiatives at the site. The cornerstone achievement of this shift toward reliability was the implementation of “Reliability Windows.” This regular cleaning (two to three times weekly), inspection, and PM task-oriented activity shared between the operations and maintenance groups helped move asset care to a joint effort, rather than just being the responsibility of the maintenance department. This initiative has been a major contributor to the site being able to produce 15 million cases in 2020 (about a 50% increase from 2010—without any additional production lines). This has been a huge advancement in ROA.                Originally presented at MainTrain September 09, 2020   Webcast  presented November 24, 2020 

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.

There will be a new normal in the aftermath of this global viral pandemic. Some of it will be out of our control and will happen to us. But some of it is within our control and presents an opportunity for significant improvement. Join us as we discuss the opportunities in asset management we can and should consider to make the best of our adversity to emerge renewed and improved.The article Paul wrote on Medium should be preread to set the stageAnd Now for Something Completely Different 

New technologies regularly enter the world of asset management (AM), often leveraging new inventions, which, in turn, are driven or supported by other advances such as computing power and big data handling. Such is the case for Motion Amplification, a new technology impacting crucial aspects of vibration analysis, machinery and structural troubleshooting, root cause analysis, and communications. This presentation will outline which areas of AM are impacted so we can have a road map facilitating the integration of the new tool into a global strategy and get an overall picture of the impacts it will have. We’ll also provide a brief technical introduction and some practical illustrations.Originally presented at MainTrain 2020

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.

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.