1.1 Requirements & Expectations

While a host of factors influence profitability, maximizing your plant’s production output potential is arguably one of the facility’s greatest opportunities. An Asset Management, Reliability and Maintenance Strategic Plan can guide continuous improvement that’s aligned with bottom-line performance expectations for managing assets and people. This presentation will provide a framework approach for establishing your strategic asset management & reliability plan and the associated business case. Delegates will gain a fundamental understanding of how to establish a baseline: "know where you are," define where you’re going, who needs to be involved, how to measure the program’s progress and results, and what elements are essential for success.

Reliability engineers in industry are often thrown into the position with very little knowledge about what they’re supposed to do. Or, sometimes, the organization isn’t set up to take advantage of what a reliability engineer can do. Sometimes these engineers have the theoretical knowledge from college but never learned what will be used in the real world. This presentation will address all the basics a new reliability engineer must know. We’ll focus on managing existing equipment and provide an overview of the reliability engineer’s role in new equipment procurement and design. We’ve found that the role of a reliability engineer is not often clear; in fact, many reliability engineers end up doing a lot of work not always related to what they should do.

With all the talk about big data and the IIoT, many are asking how can we use this in maintenance? The IIoT enables us to put sensors in any location where we might want to collect and analyze equipment condition and performance data. There are companies that offer predictive maintenance services, and some companies do this for themselves, in-house. Typically, it’s the larger companies that can afford this, but democratization has meant this has become available to a much broader market. But there are hurdles to taking advantage of this sort of continuous monitoring program, even for your most critical equipment. One, it’s expensive, whether you do it in-house or outsource. And two, there are data bottlenecks. Condition monitoring data comes is huge volumes and it’s all time-sensitive. Even if you can afford it, you need a data handling network with a lot of capacity. In this workshop, we’ll present a viable technical solution to the data bottleneck problem — based on a solution already proven in financial securities markets — that opens up these possibilities in the realm of plant continuous condition monitoring.

Asset Management Roadmaps aren’t always perfect. Often they are a work in progress. In this webcast participants will see the journey that EPCOR Water Services Inc. (EWSI) undertook when developing its Asset Management Roadmap/Framework, and learn that even with challenges along the way, the organization overall ended up with a greater understanding and acceptance of asset management.EWSI’s initial framework, developed in 2011, was closely aligned with BSI PAS 55 and later revised to reflect ISO 55000 standards. Participants will learn more about the organization’s first attempt at a typical management system development process that took place over the next 24 month period, and see how this initial approach was unsuccessful.With lessons learned, the organization revised its approach in 2013, looking at asset management related gaps with EWSI operations and used process improvement methodology to develop procedures and tools to resolve those gaps. One of the major gaps identified was lack of asset management plans. The next year, a pilot project focusing on the 10-Steps of asset management (SIMPLE) was completed.Participants will see how this pilot project demonstrated the start-to-finish development of an asset management plan, and the development and field testing of several standards, procedures and tools that would become part of EWSI’s asset management framework. This approach demonstrated the value of asset management, resulting in greater understanding and acceptance of asset management throughout EWSI.

Jeffboat is a company with a long history.  Originally named the Howard Steamboat Company, Jeffboat is America’s largest inland ship builder and has been manufacturing ships for over 100 years.  Jeffboat has built such famous ships as the Mississippi Queen, the General Jackson showboat and the Casino Aztar riverboat casino. Like most manufacturing firms, Jeffboat has an enormous amount of equipment stretched out over a shipyard that is over a mile in length that is needed to make its boats.  Also like many old-line manufacturing firms, Jeffboat has both equipment and employees who have been there for several decades. Overall, because of the size of the shipyard and age of the equipment, Jeffboat’s maintenance was used to working in reactive mode.  There was no CMMS software in place and equipment was put into numerous Excel spreadsheets.  In addition, it was often hit or miss whether the right parts were in the stores room and finding the right equipment often took maintenance technicians a significant amount of time.  There was no Scheduler/Planner and maintenance procedures were done informally and based on need at that particular moment.When implementing a maintenance management strategy, a critical component is the resistance to change. Whether it is the introduction of new software or a complete overhaul of the maintenance function, the process of change represents disruptive technology (Christenson, …). According to Christenson, most changes are really improvements on something old and the old paradigms can be used. However, there are changes that organizations need to make that disrupt the dominant paradigm, rather than sustaining it. These are disruptive technologies and make the old things less important or obsolete. The problem with these disruptive changes is that people are still applying the old paradigms to the new realities. They are trying, in a sense, to understand the car as nothing more than a carriage without horses.

Industrial maintenance has evolved from simple repair when it breaks to amazing predictable strategies. With these come the need of handling more data to enable better decision-making and effective work management. Unfortunately, we tend to forget who would feed this data into our sophisticated CMMS: people. Any EAM system is like a racehorse. It can help us to win the race — only if it’s well-fed, cared for, groomed, and trained properly; all these actions are done by people who need to understand how their functions are vital for the health of the horse and for the ultimate goal of winning the race. In asset management, people are very complicated assets, usually performing complex activities as part of a bigger picture, and CMMS/EAM systems are just the tools humans use to perform as intended; therefore, people should always be a priority. In this presentation, we’ll explore the evolution of CMMS and how human reliability is a key component for the success in the implementation and use of any software solution for EAM.Presented at MainTrain 2018

Effective maintenance plays a crucial role in today’s business. In order to manage costs, organizations attempt to get the most from their people and assets. Effective alignment between departments can dramatically improve asset reliability, reduce operation and maintenance costs and improve the effectiveness of the workforce.This presentation is intended to provide participants with the information and awareness they need to manage assets effectively. The need of cooperation between the operations and maintenance departments, as well as other departments such as supply chain will be discussed. Employees require more than high level principles; they must understand their role and how effective cooperation at all levels will provide value to the on-going operations, thereby allowing the business to remain profitable. Further, the presentation will examine the concept of Operational Excellence as the beginning of a transformation to a planned culture throughout the entire organization. Key to this topic is confirming who is in charge. Is the asset dictating how things should be done or are the people running it in charge?Asset management professionals often find themselves challenged by competing priorities in an effort to keep the system running. This session follows how maintenance tasks are initiated with work prioritization being a key element. Various roles will be discussed as well as the importance of scheduling and getting everyone on board with the schedule. Potential subtopics tailored to time restrictions: (1) Why do planned maintenance? (2) Cost of a break-in event, (3) Risk-based work selection, (4) Screening and approval of work, (5) Operators role in maintenance, (6) Operations, maintenance and supply chain departments’ role in scheduling, (7) Operations and maintenance coordination and roles, and (8) Managing the daily work list.  Presented at MainTrain 2017 

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.

In the face of global competition organizations must innovate to achieve their strategic goals as cost effectively as possible. In this session hear how the BHP Billiton Maintenance and Improvement team worked to validate the capability of the world’s biggest greenfield potash project. Using key pillars such as: asset management plan aligned with business goals, reliability design, maintainability by design, work management implementation plan, and asset care strategy development, this team unlocked new horizons of effective development for reliability and maintainability professionals. Thinking outside the box, using common and accessible tools, while determining the best stage each method should be implemented has been key to the team’s success.

EPCOR Water Services Inc (EWSI) began development of their Asset Management Roadmap / Framework in 2011. The initial Framework was closely aligned with BSI PAS 55 (later revised to reflect ISO 55000). In this session learn how EWSI attempted a typical management system development process over a 24 month period, and why this initial approach was unsuccessful.  In late 2013, a revised approach that looked at the asset management related gaps within EWSI operations and used process improvement methodology to develop procedures and tools to resolve those gaps was attempted. One of the major gaps identified was lack of asset management plans.  In 2014, a pilot project focussing on the 10-Steps of asset management (SIMPLE) was completed.  Learn how this pilot project allowed demonstration of the start-to-finish development of an asset management plan, and the development and field testing of several standards, procedures and tools that will become part of the asset management framework.   This approach demonstrated the value of asset management, resulting in greater understanding and acceptance of asset management throughout EWSI.