1.4 Strategic Maintenance Plan

As the influence of the asset management approach continues to expand within Nova Scotia Power, we need a structured approach to ensure we continue to seek opportunities to optimize maintenance strategies. In a new installation, techniques such as failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) and reliability centred maintenance (RCM) can be used to develop an optimized maintenance strategy from the start, in a top-down approach. However, the vast majority of Nova Scotia Power’s equipment was in place long before the asset management office—and, therefore, the asset management approach—existed. The result of that is a collection of value-added, but developed after-the-fact maintenance strategies. Each maintenance strategy has components of operator surveillance (rounds), testing, predictive pattern recognition (also known as advanced pattern recognition, APR), predictive maintenance (condition-based monitoring and risk-based inspections), online monitoring, and preventative maintenance. While efforts had been made to “baseline” the equipment processes when maintenance strategies were developed (i.e., “clean out” existing activities), the organic growth of the approach and the distributed nature of assets and personnel have made this difficult to maintain. Therefore, we needed an approach to optimize existing maintenance strategies, without recreating them. Nova Scotia Power has therefore undertaken an effort known as maintenance strategy optimization, and has made this activity a core accountability for the asset management team, which recognizes the need to seek continuous improvement (vs. a one-time exercise). With a focus on digitization wherever appropriate, Nova Scotia Power has asked a number of questions to streamline, standardize, and optimize its maintenance strategies. Is there opportunity to reduce PM frequency? Is there opportunity to collect more information such that we can strengthen our APR models? Can our in-house standards be revalidated to sustainably reduce operating and maintenance costs? Nova Scotia Power is answering yes to these questions, and more, and pursuing opportunities to optimize its maintenance strategies—from the bottom up! 

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.

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.

Asset-intensive industries have changed radically because of regulatory and technological changes. This has allowed many new investors to enter existing markets and forced established companies to consider new markets for growth. Simultaneously, new technology has levelled the playing field as high efficiency changes economies of scale and market dynamics. To manage their risks and uncertainties associated with new technology, while still focusing on improving profits, many asset owners look to outsourcing part of the physical asset management responsibility to specialized operations and maintenance companies. The owners gain advantages through the transfer of non-core activities to the supplier to reduce costs or to reduce risk. Whatever the rationale for outsourcing, the owner requires a method to evaluate outsourcing options to determine which is right for it, given its own internal capacity and strategy. The decision process must be capable of selecting the right type of service level based on a number of tangible and intangible strategic criteria. This type of multi-faceted decision necessitates process based on a sound theoretical foundation that can compare different options against the critical criteria of lifecycle costs, revenue influences, quality, health and safety, and other key drivers. In this workshop, we’ll look at a case study model using the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) as a tool capable of evaluating this type of diverse multi-levelled decision. AHP is simple and straightforward, and uses an easy-to-understand hierarchical structure to sort criteria based on their relative importance.  

“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.

PM ou PdM - où est l'équilibre ?- Défaillance dans le cycle de vie- Les différents patron de défaillances (RCM)- Criticité et contexte opérationnel- Les différentes tactiques possibles- Introduction à la courbe PF- Comment choisir la bonne tactique

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.

Due largely to the release of ISO55000x:2014 family of standards, Asset Management is gaining worldwide acceptance as a valid business practice for asset-intensive organizations. The challenge that organizations now face is how to operationalize the principles and move it from “being understood in theory” to being “the way that we work”, to truly distill effective asset management practices and principles to the nooks and crannies of the organization. One key tenet of ISO55000x is the management of asset risk at all levels of asset interaction. On the other side, one area that has been struggling to understand asset management beyond maintenance management is the traditional Maintenance Department. This paper will capture the steps that Veolia North America is taking one of its Municipal Clients through to understand risk at the more granular levels and build risk resilience into its maintenance strategy.Yet for the average Maintenance Manager, the challenge of interpreting asset risk for the organization is still uncharted waters. There are several ways in which the traditional Maintenance Manager can understand the wide breadth of risks facing the asset, determine appropriate responses and communicate them to the appropriate stakeholders. In fact, one or more of these may already be in place in the organization but may not be seen as building risk resilience. This presentation will explore one methodology used by Veolia to develop an asset-centric, risk-based Maintenance Strategy at the City of Winnipeg’s, Waste Water Treatment Plants using a Maintenance Management Maturity Assessment.The City of Winnipeg’s Waste Water Department is at a very interesting juncture in its history, in that there are several major capital upgrades being undertaken, whilst the plants continue to run. The goal of the Maintenance Strategy is therefore two-fold. To maintain the existing levels of service at least whole life cost with risk balanced against the cost of meeting objectives, whilst ensuring that there is a plan to maximise maintenance for the future asset base to realise the benefit of the investment over the whole life of the assets. As a result, in 2016, in collaboration with its selected O&M improvement partner, Veolia North America, the City of Winnipeg’s Waste Water Treatment Plants, went on a path of discovery. Two significant tools of investigation were employed: 1. An Asset Management Maturity Assessment was conducted and 2. The City participated in the National Waste Water Benchmarking Initiative (NWWBI) Maintenance Task Force Survey implemented by AECOM. The Asset Management Maturity Assessment examined 8 fundamental areas of Maintenance Management and outlined positions of excellence that the City hoped to achieve both at the 1-year and 3-year mark from the date of assessment with 2017 being Year 1. The NWWBI Maintenance Task Force Survey examined 42 granular yet, over-lapping areas of Maintenance Management, with 18 of them reporting significant gaps for the City’s Waste Water Treatment Plants. The results of the two analyses were combined into eight (8) key Objectives and the underlying activities required to achieving them over the next three (3) years. These eight (8) Objectives are: 1. Implementation of Asset Condition Assessment Plan (ACAP) 2. Inventory Management Optimization Plan (IMOP) 3. Work Organization Improvement Plan (WOIP) 4. Implementation of Maintenance Quality Strategy (MQS) 5. Financial Capability Improvement Plan (FCIP) 6. Asset Registry Improvement Plan (ARIP) 7. Implementation of Document Management (DM) 8. Revision and Implementation of Asset Criticality Model (ACM)This presentation will examine the detailed plans for each objective, the inter-connectivity and alignment of the Objectives, the Road Map for the next 3 years, the processes for monitoring and continual improvement and the benefits of implementing this approach. Presented at MainTrain 2017