4.0 Tools and Tactics General

We’ve all heard time and time again the value that Planning and Scheduling brings to a Maintenance organization. But, is your organization fully realizing this value? If Planning and Scheduling is intended to be a “wrench time multiplier” of you Maintenance Technicians, have you looked at the “wrench time” of your Planners and Schedulers? What are the potential barriers preventing them from achieving the ultimate goals of their roles? Can one Maintenance Planner really bring the same effective value as 15-17 tradespersons in your organization? Likely not, and it isn’t the fault of your Planners and Schedulers. In this presentation we’ll review the planning and scheduling function, define what it really is, and more importantly what it is NOT. We’ll also take a close look at many of the “value vampires” common in Planning and Scheduling that detract from the intended value generation. We’ll compare what an ideal Day-in-the-life of a Maintenance Planner should be against the realities they so commonly face. The intent of this presentation is to help you understand Why Planning and Scheduling is likely less effective than it could be in your organization. More importantly, this will hopefully trigger changes that help the Planners and Schedulers in your teams do more of what they do best.

Discussion Forum:Since 2001 ICML has maintained that its MLT, MLA, LLA, and MLE certifications are beneficial to hands-on lubrication practitioners and to their employers. Normally, a case study presentation would demonstrate such value with a before-and-after narrative that describes a specific plant’s successful journey to machinery lubrication excellence. Today, however, we thought it would be fun to put several of our certified professionals together and let them recount bits and pieces of their combined experiences in a free-flowing Q&A mashup, as they get to talk about how their own ICML credentials have helped them and their clients on various projects through the years.

The Global Forum on Maintenance & Asset Management and highlights of the second edition of it’s recently published Maintenance Framework, including the project to develop the document and differences from the first edition.

Maintenance strategies and practices have evolved. From reactive, preventative, predictive to proactive maintenance – all or parts of them continue to be used in some industries and plants but not all of them work. In fact, some of them, like predictive maintenance failed. CMMS systems have greatly contributed to the evolution of maintenance. It gave us better order & structure. It contains many records including items like a machine's assets condition monitoring (CM) history. However, in most cases, what’s not in it is the initial installation or commissioning report. As an industry, we often overlook the importance of the installation and commissioning report data. In many cases, it’s assumed that the installation was done correctly and that’s why predictive maintenance failed. All the CM data was incorrect because we were working off the wrong benchmark. In our experience, we know that there are still many companies who have not subscribed fully to the precision maintenance philosophy, which is: installing, maintaining and working to a recognized standard. One of the reasons for this was that there wasn’t one until the ANSI Shaft Alignment and Machinery Installation Standard came out in 2017. New technologies like motion amplification cameras are now game changers in revealing how important the machinery installation and precision maintenance as a whole is. Seeing and watching a video broken down at that frequency, showing a machine moving and vibrating excessively allows us to now pinpoint exactly what the issue is. Instead of only a select few who know specific CM technologies, this is a visual that everybody can see and understand that the machine has not been installed correctly. The introduction of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is a further step in the evolution of maintenance. In order for us to keep our machine assets running for their full life cycles, the initial precision installation, commissioning and continued precision maintenance practices must be done including the report the machines history before you can begin to collect data for CM analysis. If we don't do this, our maintenance strategy will fail like it did for predictive maintenance. 

Maintenance practices have evolved from breakdown maintenance to predictive maintenance. As maintenance practices have evolved, so have maintenance improvement programs. Each evolution added a portion of what drives maintenance value as the key element. These programs created improvements, but generally failed to achieve their full objectives. In part, this was because they focused on one driver of maintenance value and did not consider the other drivers.This presentation will describe a pragmatic approach of maintenance improvement based on the drivers of maintenance value. It will do this by exploring the drivers of maintenance value. It will then examine the maintenance practices and improvement programs such as RCM (Reliability Centered Maintenance) and TPM (Total Productive Maintenance) and identifying which driver of maintenance value they focused on. The paper will discuss why a sustainable program needs to examine all aspects of maintenance value and describe an approach that can be used to identify and implement improvements.

Most asset owning and operating organizations managing maintenance activities use a computer system – either a CMMS, or an EAM, or possibly a module in their ERP. Usually they want to sustain reliable performance of their assets to deliver high availability to their operations or production groups. These systems are often sold under the moniker, “solution”. Implied in that is the solution to some sort of a problem, one might imagine that it will deliver high reliability, or better maintenance practices, yet they don’t and can’t. Many have fallen victim to slick marketing, buzz words, and promises of functionality that are little more than dreams – vapourware. To get those practical business results you need to change what you are doing and how you are doing it, not how you are tracking it and managing the activities. Those systems do provide some help with data storage, reports, keeping organized and work flows, but they don’t help you define what work to do, nor how often, nor who should do it, they don’t do anything to ensure you actually do the work, and then record what you did with any accuracy. The result is often a system that is riddled with inaccurate, incomplete, or otherwise unfit data that can actually make work for, and be misleading to the system’s users. Interestingly, after seeing hundreds of different instances of different systems in a large variety of organizations, there are some common problems. If you are a supplier of these systems, you can probably relax now. Very few of the problems m have anything at all to do with the software itself. This presentation will explore the reasons for those disappointments and some of the possible solutions.

Is safety a concern for your organization? What about reliability? How is it that aviation is able to ensure such safe operations? Yes, that industry has trained pilots with lots of experience, but that alone is not enough. Doctors are well trained, as are our skilled tradespeople, yet mistakes are common. So how do we overcome those mistakes? The Checklist Manifesto shows how checklists have, and can, make such a significant difference in the aviation, medical, and construction fields. Why not learn from these industries and apply that same methodology to our maintenance programs? Developing a checklist is not as simple as throwing a bunch of steps on a piece of paper and handing it to our skilled tradespeople. Checklists have to be simple and address the right issues. We also have to overcome some stigma to get our tradespeople to use them. 

This Project was established to review all facets of Maintenance within the St Lawrence Seaway Management Corporation (SLSMC) with a goal to improve productivity, maintaining a positive impact on maintenance staff moral and provide the same or increased equipment reliability. Maintenance Programs were reviewed for all major assets and analyzed using subject matter experts leveraging the FMECA (Failure Mode, Effects & Criticality Analysis) tool to determine areas of vulnerability within the assets ability to perform at the designed operational level Maintenance Processes were analyzed using some of the Lean Six Sigma and Work Measurement tools with focus on the six (6) steps of Work Management Cycle (Identify, Plan, Schedule, Assign, Execute and Learn) to get a better understanding of the problem areas and generate solutions to this issue backed by actual results. Work Organization main focus was to improve Supervisory awareness and availability in providing support to trades employees and conducting regular field audits to ensure accuracy and quality of task execution. Investigations and work process flow analysis are also planned for individual Trade Shops and Warehouse Facility Layouts to improve work space planning and component/part inventories. Change Management focus was on Vision Mapping, Stakeholder Analysis, Communication Planning and transition coordination of all improvements and changes that will affect the entire organization during the progression of each stage of the project. The findings of the project to date showed that there were a lot of excess maintenance tasks being performed on managed assets. The estimated labour times for task completion, travel and delay inefficiencies of work tasks being performed were excessive and daily performed tasks contained value and non-value activities over all process steps of the Work Management Cycle. All findings discovered and work that continuous to be performed at each stage of this project confirms that there is a lot of variability, inefficiencies and opportunities for improvements within all facets of the Maintenance within the Organization.