10 Continuous Improvement

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. 

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.

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.

If you are working in maintenance, reliability, or asset management, but not involved in ‘pulling wrenches’, then communication is a significant part of doing your job effectively. And even if you are pulling wrenches, communication still is important to your work.

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! 

As our organization recently embarked on a digital transformation of our work management processes, it became obvious that what we were actually changing wasn’t just the technology we used—we also had to change our people. We recognized that this change was too big and too important to leave to chance and decided instead to apply a structured, methodical, and deliberate approach. This is a case study in the approach we took and the tools we used to ensure the changes required of our workforce were as painless as possible. We’ll outline how the approach impacted our success and detail the lessons learned. We’ll demonstrate how we approached the following topics: assessing the scope of change, analysis of gaps between present and future states, planning for change, change methodology (ADKAR), roles and responsibilities, where does change fit into project planning, communications, building desire for change, assessment of your change audience, building the knowledge and skills of your audience, and monitoring change progress. The intent of this study is to demonstrate some techniques and tools you can apply to any changes being undertaken, with the hope that you can help to “grease the wheels” of change within your own organization.

Your KPIs and metrics—though they’re very different—are trying to tell you something. But, do you understand what they’re trying to say? Are they really measuring what you think they’re measuring, or are you missing out on important information? In this session, we’ll look at the differences between KPIs and metrics, and explore how they’re arrived at and should be arrived at. We’ll challenge some of the old and accepted maintenance measures that many organizations use. First, though, we’ll discuss why we actually measure things and examine if we meet that premise. Feel free to bring your KPIs for discussion!

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.  

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.