10.3 Maintenance Management Improvements

Cameco Corp. has recently deployed approximately 1,500 wireless asset condition monitoring sensors across four of its operations. This presentation will explore all aspects of this project, from initial identification of business pain, all the way through to deployment and management of the system. Condition-based monitoring of rotating assets typically involves a route that is executed at a fixed interval to collect asset condition data. This data can include vibration, temperature, acoustic emissions, and others. This data is then downloaded into software and analyzed for faults and trends. This method has many shortcomings that can be solved with remote sensing technology. This presentation will take you through Cameco’s journey of identifying the limitations of traditional data collection and why an alternative was investigated. Some of the key topics will include problems and inefficiencies with the current system, methodology used to determine which sensor company to partner with, potential cost savings and benefits, deployment strategy and execution, and some screen captures of actual asset detections. Finally, we will conclude with lessons learned and benefits realized from deploying a sensor solution.

An Intelligent machine can sense its environment, take a decision and apply an action or give a recommendation. How this can transform maintenance? With every Industrial Revolution, Maintenance tools and strategies grow to provide the needed service for this industrial era. Now what shall we do with the Augmented reality and other technologies that Industry 4.0 introduces in the production environment??! It is important to understand what AI -Artificial Intelligence in details is because it is currently part of our work and life even if we do not realize this. When we understand how AI works, we can use it as our ally. Otherwise, we shall resist its existence specially when it starts to give recommendations and report of what went good and what went bad. AI is a title frequently applied to the project of developing systems with the intellectual similar to those of humans, such as the ability to reason, discover meaning, generalize, or learn from past experience. The human maintenance team applies its intellectual process at every situation it encounters. This intellectual process includes the ability to reason, discover meaning, generalize, or learn from experience. How AI does this? It is all based on software and Algorithms. There are two (2) ways for the software to yield intelligent advices or actions. You either add to it all the possible solutions of a problem and the software searches through all possibilities to find a one matching to this situation, then returns the stored actions for this possibility. Alternatively, the other way is to let the algorithms of the intelligent software infer some reasoning based on the inputs then solve the problem. . Let us relate this to maintenance

Presentation highlights the importance and interdependency of three pillars of success (people, processes, and technology) and Cameco’s asset management improvement efforts through each of these, including lessons learned. Audience will learn about the importance of organizational change management, business process management and agile methodologies, some of the technologies supporting asset maintenance and reliability, and its new Asset Management & Reliability Center of Excellence.

Are we converting our data to decisions? What is the state of digital adoption in asset management? What has changed since the onset of Covid? What has stayed the same? Using the DIKW Pyramid as our guide, combined with the experience and insights of our panelists; we will explore best practices in data-informed decision-making. Are we now in a much different place on our digital adoption journey?  

Imagine your production facility as a 1950s pickup truck. It’s functional, but a lack of available parts, new regulatory standards, and an absence of modern sensors and electronics make diagnosing problems and improving performance difficult. Commissioned in 1954, Sherritt International Corporation faces many challenges characteristic of a classic car—challenges that not only include equipment lifecycles, but also human resources, software, workflows, and asset obsolescence. This case study will review the training, business process transformation projects, organizational design changes, and continuous improvement initiatives that Sherritt is implementing to modernize their work management processes. See how optimization of these processes have helped address the challenges presented by an aging site, and learn how projects were prioritized, which initiatives helped build organizational capability and improve performance, and what wasn’t worth the effort.

Within the mining industry, the library of KPIs has not kept up with data that has become increasingly available through digitization, therefore leading to an overuse of lagging performance indicators. Additionally, due to the fact that strategic corporate goals are oftentimes built on the basis of soft or perceptual measures from stakeholders, which are subjective in nature, organizations struggle with the process of linking strategic level goals to KPIs on the shop floor. Therefore, creating a communication gap between technical teams and senior management. As a consequence, maintenance leaders have a difficult time demonstrating the added value that maintenance activities create with an organization, leading to challenges in securing the resources required for things such as continuous improvement projects. Considering that the implementation of a robust KPI framework is an alignment of three key areas: people, process, and technology, the first portion of this presentation will be investigating a holistic approach to developing maintenance KPIs that are integrated into corporate strategic goals. Therefore, outlining the steps required for organizational leaders to begin standardizing data gathering procedures and creating a trustworthy system that can be leveraged for decision making. Aside from the previously discussed administrative challenges associated with data gathering within organizations, it must also be highlighted that KPIs are collected on a monthly or quarterly basis, meaning that training sets for forecasting models are extremely limited. Therefore, in order to address the reliance on lagging performance indicators within maintenance departments, a variety of time series models capable of achieving high accuracy on small datasets will be discussed along with direct business applications. Through achieving these goals, the intended outcome is to create a more contemporary data driven methodology for selecting organizational KPIs, as well as directly demonstrating the added value that the various business units create within the organization.

The Irving Pulp & Paper maintenance team was the recipient of the PEMAC Maintenance Team of the Year Award for 2021. The team was honored to be nominated based upon long term sustained performance improvements, professional development, controlling reactive maintenance and continuous improvement.

Maintenance Turnaround events involve major expenditures of time and money for any large continuous process plant. Without careful planning and preparation they can quickly and easily overrun their target cost and schedule. The larger and more complex the scope to be executed in the turnaround, the greater the risk is, of cost and schedule overruns. For this reason, it has, in recent years, become the norm for turnaround teams to use a “scope challenge” process, just before freezing the scope list. The purpose of the challenge being to review every work item and decide whether it should be in the scope of the turnaround event. Some of these “scope challenge” sessions can get quite sophisticated, involving a risk assessment, balancing the cost of doing the maintenance repair in the turnaround against the cost of doing it after a (probability weighted) breakdown during normal running. Many turnaround teams stop there, and assume that if they’ve had a “scope challenge”, then they’ve done what they can to optimize and control the scope. But more and more are beginning to realise that a “Risk Based Work Selection” Scope challenge session, while useful and necessary, is only one element in a process for choosing and controlling the work scope at an optimum level. This paper will describe a successful and more holistic approach, using scope control methods that start with the premise document (reference earlier article), include the scope gathering phase, go through the “Risk Based Work Selection” process and carry on to the “Additional Work Request” process after scope freeze. Along the way it will also discuss how to ensure that site leadership and plant operations staff “buy in” to the need to control the scope.

We know that reliability has value to your business, but many of us with technical backgrounds struggle to present a good business case to decision-makers. We are very often held back by budget constraints and we are not in a position to make decisions involving financial risk-taking. Most of us don't have a business background, nor do we speak "finance". It is a whole different language than maintenance and reliability, yet we all want the same things for our business. This presentation will give you some ideas on what you will need to determine in order to show what reliability is worth, and how to present that to decision-makers.

The ultimate maintenance KPI must show if we are keeping assets from breaking and not just fixing them after they break. While our maintenance forces are responsible for fixing things that break, we have really failed in our primary mission to keep them working in the first place! In Six Sigma terminology, the ultimate maintenance KPI should be about eliminating defects. Emergency and urgent work requests are “defects.” How many do we have? Are we getting better at eliminating them? Simply put, that’s what it’s all about. Modern maintenance knows that the key to reducing emergency and urgent work orders is doing more proactive work such as PM, PdM, and project work to head off reactive work. However, because many plants are overwhelmed with reactive work, planning and scheduling are critical to help us complete the extra proactive work. We track and manage simple supporting planning and scheduling KPIs to achieve super-high productivity and quality of work. These easy-to-measure KPIs are schedule compliance, schedule loading, work order completion rate, planned coverage, creation of reusable job plans, keeping a minimal unplanned backlog, and amount of helpful feedbacks received.