10.4 Maintenance Practices Improvements

Preventive Maintenance (PM) Optimization is often thought of as an activity to improve the effectiveness of the maintenance strategy, looking at the activities in the PM routine and matching them with known failure modes. While this is the first step to improving any maintenance strategy, it is just a beginning. In order for an organization to achieve its highest performance, they not only need to do the right maintenance, but they also need to do it efficiently.This is where PM Optimization can unlock the hidden potential. When PM Optimization is combined with known and accepted Lean techniques, the efficiency of maintenance is truly unlocked. When performing PM Optimization, the team should be aware of the 8 types of waste: (1) Defects, (2) Overproduction, (3) Waiting, (4) Not utilizing talent, (5) Transportation, (6) Inventory excess, (7) Motion waste, and (8) Excess processing. Once the team is aware of the waste, there needs to be an unrelenting focus on eliminating the waste and minimizing planned downtime. To eliminate the waste, the team uses various Lean tools, such as SMED, 5s, and Visual Factory. When the 8 types of waste are targeted, the amount of planned downtime goes down, allowing higher levels of asset utilization. Presented at MainTrain 2017

Electrical reliability requirements for facilities vary based on their criticality to the organization. Unplanned outages can cost millions of dollars in damages, directly and indirectly. Furthermore, it impacts the performance and compensation of a facility’s engineers, operators and plant managers. Although poorly understood among stakeholders, electrical system reliability is directly tied to productivity and operating cost. This presentation will demonstrate that by quantifying the statistical probability of an electrical system failure, maintenance resources can be prioritized to address the critical components of your system and therefore minimize maintenance costs. Participants will see that by understanding the type of inherent failure modes of your equipment, recommendations can be made to improve preventative maintenance programs, to implement on‐line and off‐line predictive maintenance programs and to eliminate ‘single points of failure’ all of which will contribute to minimizing downtime in the event of an unplanned outage.

​Fully understanding the maintenance and reliability strengths and weaknesses within a facility can be a huge undertaking.  Traditionally, a study to understand reliability is performed by either calculating, tracking, and comparing key performance indicators, or through a qualitative approach, observing compliance with best practices of maintenance and reliability activities to determine perceived strengths and weaknesses. Both approaches have downsides.  In this session, participants will learn about a more effective and repeatable reliability assessment that includes a quantitative assessment using plant CMMS work history to develop trends, key performance indicators, and comparisons that will either validate or invalidate strengths and weaknesses as determined in a qualitative assessment with plant personnel.  See how the ability to reliably gather and assess historical CMMS data will depend on determining a set of requirements or data signatures which can be used to validate strengths and weaknesses.  Additionally, the quantitative cost information can be effectively used to justify projects, programs, and personnel required to improve maintenance and reliability activities. Learn how a reliability assessment can most efficiently and effectively be administered in this way; the use of a qualitative assessment to better focus a quantitative analysis provides the best combination of overall understanding from personnel with the accuracy and reliability of historical data. 

Today, leaders of organizations are stretched to do more with less. They are asked to cover more areas with fewer resources, with less time and smaller budgets. Given these constraints, how can we continue to drive improvement and achieve success? We must focus tactically to drive improvement and eliminate issues that impact our ability to perform. In this session participants will see how focused improvement efforts can provide significant bottom line impacts and be sustained after the project. Learn how chronic and persistent reliability issues can be solved using a targeted Process Performance OptimizationSM (PPO) approach that integrates best practices in change management, lean and asset management. In order to effectively drive PPO, organizations should focus on this four-step approach along with weaving in an appropriate level of change management to sustain the gains.