10.1 Metrics / KPIs

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.

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 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.

The U.K. railway network dates back to 1825 and is the oldest railway in the world. Several electrical assets on the network such as track power cables, switchgears, overhead line isolators, circuit breakers, and insulators are beyond their design life and the business must decide whether to renew or replace them—even though they're still operating at the optimum performance level. These assets are still being maintained at the original regimes; the challenge to the business is to understand the degradation models and change them to achieve different maintenance regimes for the aging assets. The work we're currently undertaking is intended to influence and change our asset policies—in particular, the assignment of asset regimes for assets that remain in service at the end of their design life and beyond. The philosophy behind the maintenance regimes is that they're based on degradation models, which are algorithms that consider various factors such as the environment, the loading, the utilization, the reliability, and the cost for interventions. The approach we pursued was to review the parameters of the degradation models for their “fit,” based on the knowledge asset managers have gained on the ground and through large volumes of asset data. The asset data was analyzed with data visualization software to gain further insight to influence the review of the degradation models. The findings of the work are summarized here: asset population is aging and future renewals bow wave are predicted; asset policy pushes all assets to maximum asset technical life and fix-on or run-to failure; safety-related works prioritized over asset performance/resilience; there's a need to modify some factors associated with the degradation models to cater for extension of technical asset life and maintain a more realistic/sustainable asset renewal profile; composite asset condition scores are required to manage bow wave of asset renewals and implement sustainable obsolescence management techniques (this is predominantly driven by organizational investment decisions where enhancements are the main driver of asset acquisition, making future renewals difficult due to the requirement to renew similar age assets at the same time); and determination of useful asset life required for assets that are being left in service longer than their originally predicted life.

Learn to build a business case for improvements in Maintenance at your operations. You know your maintenance performance can improve, you know the problems you are faced with, you know some of what to do to correct it, you know it will take effort and some investment, and you need to prove it is worth investing in to your senior management / executive branch. To make the case, you need to show what it can save or earn for your business - where you will see the payoff and you need to estimate the cost of the investment. This is a hand's on workshop. Bring your maintenance performance metrics and be ready to work. You will be shown useful benchmarks that can be used and how to use them. Using those and the metrics from your current state you will show the potential benefit of making changes. After working out the potential benefits we will discuss tips for getting support and making your case an easy sell.

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?

Metrics, best practices, more than 40 key elements to implement, challenges, and opportunities all combine to make a successful implementation difficult. Where do you start, and how do you know how to work on what matters? Once you understand how it’s all related, you can focus on the vital few to leverage the maximum ROI. This presentation will clarify the importance of culture and employee engagement, along with other key plant floor performance indicators that will be clarified with data. We'll look at the current state of R&M; what’s working and what's not; survival skills for the next decade; impacts of connected technologies (edge computing, big data, machine learning, AI, 3D printing, augmented reality); the importance of getting your data ready for what's coming next; and relationships between R&M and safety, people engagement, quality, throughput/uptime, and cost.

As always, equipment maintainability plays an important role in uptime. Besides the reduction of failure rates, the quick recovery from those failures or the successful execution of scheduled activities makes a considerable difference in availability indicators. The application of Lean tools and Six Sigma analysis contributes to the improvement of maintenance execution by applying the 5 steps of Lean Six Sigma methodology (Define, Measure, Analyze, Implement and Control) and using the tools associated with them. This webcast will discuss Lean Six Sigma theory, basic principles of the methodology and case studies showing the use of tools. Case 1 will illustrate the application of Lean Six Sigma in scheduled preventive maintenance for slurry pumps operating in the oil sands industry. Case 2 will examine how the use of Six Sigma analysis reduced the corrosion rate of tubes in a bank of 12 heat exchangers shell and tube type, which heat diluted bitumen upstream of a distillation tower. Both cases emphasize the importance of using data and facts to make decisions, including front end personnel, and the sustainment of implemented solutions.