1.2 Enablers & Constraints

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.  

Airports are an important economic hub for a region. They help regional economies extend their reach and often create a localized cluster of companies around it, termed “airport cities.” Indeed, airports face many of the same challenges that municipalities do. They have a portfolio of diverse infrastructure that supports a variety of services to customers in a challenging, dynamic environment. There are many stakeholders who have an interest in service levels, and revenues are often less than what is required to meet expectations. Edmonton International Airport (EIA) has implemented an asset management program that began with the successful implementation of a computerized maintenance management system to better understand its cost of service. It has also recently established an asset management strategy that systematically employs risk, strategic goals, and service priority for investment decision-making. This presentation will provide a case study of EIA's progress to date as well as future steps.

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.

Ross Markowski was part of the final phases of construction of a gas plant that was experiencing a change of ownership. Ross used the Capstone Project and the myriad changes happening at his site as an opportunity to think through the possibilities of a new organizational design and leadership model to achieve site-wide engagement in proactive maintenance for the upcoming commissioning and operation of the plant. Ross’s presentation summarizes the pros and cons of the existing and proposed organizational structures and touches on some of the challenges of implementation.Whether you are in oil/gas, manufacturing, forestry or another industry, you will find the lessons learned through Ross Markowski’s Capstone Project applicable to most situations where changes are occurring, work still needs to planned and executed and people are your most important resource in getting the work done.

“Sustainability through reliability” — presented at the 2015 MainTrain Conference — focused on the rapid growth of passenger flow at Toronto Pearson Airport and how, due to this growth, we were experiencing a high number of plumbing drainage failures. We carried out an RCA on our system and came up with changes in how we would prevent drainage failures. The changes we made dealt with our plumbing design standards; food and beverage tenant fats; oil and organics recovery system; lease agreements; and maintenance practices. However, that was only the starting point. In this presentation, we’ll discuss RCA conducted, the failures experienced, and the enhancements and improvements we made to make our system more reliable.

In 2017, the LINK Automated People Mover (APM) at Toronto Pearson International Airport transported an average of 24,000 passengers per day — a 20% increase in passenger traffic from 2015, according to a 2017 report by the GTAA. To increase operational service levels, preventative maintenance optimization (PMO) initiatives were undertaken in 2015 and 2016 in co-ordination with the APM owner, manufacturer, and O&M service provider. The initiatives were designed to increase the overall day-to-day operational run-time of the LINK system while maintaining existing levels of safety and reliability. In this workshop, we’ll use the LINK APM system as a case study to discuss the requirements for successful PMO implementation, which include interorganizational communication and co-operation, RCM strategies, and due diligence as it relates to safety-related subsystems and processes. We’ll also offer a blueprint for similar optimization strategies.

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.

Neuroscience has become a rising star in the sky of management theory. The notion that we can improve behaviour and interaction in the workplace to enhance performance, creativity, innovation, reliability, and safety by understanding how our brain works is on the rise. Neuroscience goes deeper into behaviour than traditional approaches in developing a safety and reliability culture, by exploring the various layers of the mind that are crucial to shaping and sustaining positive attitudes to, and belief in, safety and reliability. In essence, neuroscience brings a new understanding of the relationships between brain, mind, and behaviour. Understanding how the brain develops and how these developments influence our behaviour is of interest to managers and scientists alike. Social cognitive neuroscience is concerned with the brain’s role in social and emotional aspects of human cognition and behaviour — in other words, how we relate to each other and how this influences our behaviour. People’s interactions and relationships with others are strong indicators of safety and reliability behaviour. These everyday interactions impact decision-making, risk-taking, judgment, and attention to tasks. This presenter has hands-on experience on how to develop a safety culture that leads to an increase in productivity and quality.