2.2 Organizational Structure

This presentation is a case study on the Maintenance Journey for the Simcoe Muskoka Catholic District School Board guiding participants through the transformation of the school board's maintenance department which originally consisted of an informal program focussed on breakdown maintenance and reactive work, and to the current state of a formal maintenance program.The journey includes leveraging resources to baseline maturity and establish focus areas for evolving practices and adding structure. I will speak about specific initiatives completed and are in process which have established the organisation's programs, engagement, clarity, and purpose. It's a good news story which will also share how the tools and practices inherently part of the PEMAC community and body of knowledge have assisted in modernizing this team and organisation.

As maintainers, we know there is a lot of value in what we do. Without our work, plant, and equipment will soon stop and our companies will then go out of business. What we do impacts safety, health, revenues, costs, and company reputation. A dirty little truth about maintenance is that it is only we who work in it, that really know the value of what we do – or do we? We do know our value in qualitative terms, but can we quantify it? Most maintenance can be improved and we know it. We can do things more efficiently, and we can keep things running more reliably. We often know how to do that, but when we want to make those improvements there is no money for them. Why? Most business people know very little about what we do and how it impacts their business. They see maintenance as a repair shop. We fix what breaks. And they know little, or nothing, more. They may know that maintenance represents a significant cost, and they may even know that they can’t get away with cutting it too much. But they do not know the full value of what maintenance can deliver, nor what it takes to deliver it. If you want to make improvements you need a decision-maker, someone with executive-level authority, to back you up. To get that, you will need to explain what value you can deliver, and in terms they can understand. You will need to show them the savings that are possible from doing things more efficiently, and the added revenues that can arise from investment in defining the right work. You will also need to show them how their support is needed to bring operators and the supply chain into the team with you to make those changes happen so that benefits are fully realized. Quantifying value and being simple in how you say it matters.

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.

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.

In 2010, a privately owned tissue-converting facility in New Brunswick (Irving Tissue) considered itself a well-oiled machine, being able to product 10 million cases of product annually—a huge leap forward from where it started in 1990, with 200,000 cases. The site was piloting a PMO on one of 12 production lines when a vision was pitched to the site leadership team: implementing PMO’s activities and principles on each production line would allow the site to streamline its efforts and result in increased production, with a higher product quality and fewer injuries. This pitch aligned with several of the company’s core values and allowed the leadership team to see there was still substantially more gains to be made at the facility that didn’t necessarily require capital investment, but simply changes to work processes. While this plan didn’t come to fruition, it aligned the leadership team to make reliability a focus rather than just production. This alignment paved the way for several reliability-centred improvement initiatives at the site. The cornerstone achievement of this shift toward reliability was the implementation of “Reliability Windows.” This regular cleaning (two to three times weekly), inspection, and PM task-oriented activity shared between the operations and maintenance groups helped move asset care to a joint effort, rather than just being the responsibility of the maintenance department. This initiative has been a major contributor to the site being able to produce 15 million cases in 2020 (about a 50% increase from 2010—without any additional production lines). This has been a huge advancement in ROA.                Originally presented at MainTrain September 09, 2020   Webcast  presented November 24, 2020 

There is much literature on work sampling studies—from useful to not useful. Useful if the studies are done properly, and dangerous if not properly done, which happens more often than not. This presentation will dispel the myths about wrench time by addressing some old-fashioned concepts and strategies that work, just like the kind you would find in classic Western movies, where the heroes have a clear vision, develop strategies and plans, take action, and don’t let obstacles get in the way. The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly was set during the American Civil War, where three men were determined to find $200,000 in Confederate gold coins that was ambushed by Yankees and buried in a remote southwest cemetery. But where is the value of finding gold in performing work sampling studies? That’s why you need to round up the horses, get the campfire lit, and settle in for an entertaining hands-on, informative presentation to learn about the good, and bad, and the ugly of work sampling studies to measure wrench time. Dennis Heinzlmeir has led 12 work sampling studies across Canada at various industrial facilities. He will reveal the results to support that when studies are completed in the right manner, they offer valuable benchmarks to organizations that lead them to drive down maintenance costs and increase uptime through continuous improvements. Ineffectiveness and inefficiencies can creep into a company’s work management process; having this health check can save millions of dollars. Just like a Western’s happy ending, this presentation will address the many misconceptions, misunderstandings, and myths about wrench time. Measuring wrench time is a very effective means of improving productivity if it’s done with a focus on removing obstacles and frustrations that prevent maintenance work from being completed efficiently and effectively.

Oftentimes, maintenance is left to suffer the consequences of otherwise “successfully” completed and handed-over projects. While project teams are more interested in the project constraints of scope, time, and cost at handover, maintenance is concerned with maintainability, reliability, availability, cost, and safety for the duration of the asset lifecycle. This conflict is not often given due consideration, and maintenance is often brought into the team long after the asset has been commissioned and handed over to operations. This presentation will make a strong case for including maintenance at all stages of a project—a case for maintenance readiness. It describes the slowly changing paradigm shift and acceptance (albeit lukewarm) of operations readiness, with no corresponding consideration to maintenance readiness. It uses real-life examples to show that the "cost savings" from not including maintenance in projects is mostly eroded in the first few months of the asset lifecycle. We'll make the case for a paradigm shift toward including maintenance readiness to all projects. Inserting the maintenance team in all the project phases will not only improve asset availability, reliability, and lifecycle cost, but also enhance cross-functional team synergy and professionalism, and ultimately reduce this stress element from maintenance.

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.  

Reliability Centered Maintenance – Reengineered, provides an optimized approach to a well established and highly successful method used for determining failure management policies for physical assets. It makes the original method that was developed to enhance flight safety, far more useful in a broad range of industries where asset criticality ranges from high to low. RCM-R® is focused on the science of failures and what must be done to enable long term sustainably reliable operations. If used correctly, RCM-R® is the first step in delivering fewer breakdowns, more productive capacity, lower costs, safer operations and improved environmental performance. Maintenance has a huge impact on most businesses whether its presence is felt or not. RCM-R® ensures that the right work is done to guarantee there are as few nasty surprises as possible that can harm the business in any way. RCM-R® addresses the shortfalls of RCM that have inhibited its broad acceptance in industry. Little new work has been done in the field of RCM since the 1990’s, yet demand for such a method, better adapted to industrial applications is higher than ever and growing. Demographics and ever more complex systems are driving a need to be more efficient in our use of skilled maintenance resources while ensuring first time success – greater effectiveness is needed. RCM-R® was developed to leverage on RCM’s original success at delivering that effectiveness while addressing the concerns of the industrial market. RCM-R® addresses the RCM method and shortfalls in its application. It modifies the method to consider asset and even failure mode criticality so that rigor is applied only where it is truly needed. It removes (within reason) the sources of concern about RCM being overly rigorous and too labor intensive without compromising on its ability to deliver a tailored failure management program for physical assets sensitive to their operational context and application. RCM-R® also provides its practitioners with standard based guidance for determining meaningful failure modes and causes facilitating their analysis for optimum outcome. It places RCM into the Asset Management spectrum strengthening the original method by introducing International Standard based risk management methods for assessing failure risks formally. RCM-R® employs quantitative reliability methods tailoring evidence based decision making whenever historical failure data is available.

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.