4.4 Preventive Maintenance

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.

Asset Criticality is an important input to production system design, maintenance strategy definition and short term work execution management processes. The value the supporting FEMA exercises provide in determining these categorizations is well understood in the Reliability Community. Less common is the extension of this analytical rigor to the spare parts required to maintain equipment. Establishing and maintaining robust part criticality values can be an invaluable link between operations and the supporting supply chain, helping to set stocking strategies, inform alternative material management approaches and quickly flag when expediting is required. Despite the value, part criticality values (or Risk Priority Numbers) are rarely objectively derived and even less frequently maintained. This presentation is intended to: 1. Establish the link between asset health and spare part availability 2. Illustrate common item criticality practices 3. Provide an overview of a robust item criticality assessment approach 4. Highlight the benefits to be gained from an enhanced approach to item criticality determination.

We know that reliability has value to your business, but many of us with technical backgrounds struggle to present a good business case to decision-makers. We are very often held back by budget constraints and we are not in a position to make decisions involving financial risk-taking. Most of us don't have a business background, nor do we speak "finance". It is a whole different language than maintenance and reliability, yet we all want the same things for our business. This presentation will give you some ideas on what you will need to determine in order to show what reliability is worth, and how to present that to decision-makers.

Sharing a recent mandate with a mining client where we assessed the maturity of maintenance management. The webinar will also cover the findings and our actions for improvement.Approach   1. After dozens of interviews from trades to maintenance manager, from operators to supervisors, we started to gather an understanding of the situation.   2. Then, a thorough analysis was performed on work order history, PM percentage vs total available work hours, schedule compliance and production KPIs to help pinpoint several recurring issues.   3. The analysis was concluded with on-site shadowing of supervisors and trades. We selected key dates to execute day-in-the-life-of exercises (i.e., shutdown days) to assess the quality of shutdown management and observe the execution effectiveness. Actions in partnership Tool time is a powerful metric because it helps to expose the majority of the teams’ shortcomings: engagement of the team, respect of processes, communication between departments and productivity of all the maintenance members. After the assessment and analysis, we got to work:   1. Work management process   2. Maintenance tactics review     3. Maintenance execution   4. Spare parts analysis Results With a SWAT team approach, we reduced maintenance backlog by 20%, which allowed us to focus on high criticality assets. In less than 8 weeks, we started to see a reduction in major breakdowns of equipment. We started performing root cause analysis on each breakdown and defect elimination workshops to achieve better reliability. By reducing waste related to maintenance activities in planning & execution, the team managed to transfer the work hours toward preventive tasks. The actions got translated into an improved plant availability and higher engagement

Is your company struggling to forecast, and have parts arrive on time to perform preventive maintenance, or know when downtime should occur that would be least disruptive? Would your company benefit from more accurate cost predictions and a decrease in last minute emergency breakdowns? Or perhaps you cannot depend on what the system has for inventory or how many staff are required on site at a given time – there are somehow too many or not enough at any given time. These are common issues faced by many large manufacturers from Marine, to Mining to Oil & Gas, and many others. This session will provide an overview of how basic Machine Learning techniques can be applied to Supply Chain, Reliability, and Asset Management to gain increased insight, and better overall performance. But what is Machine Learning? It is a subset of Artificial Intelligence, where algorithms improve through experience (new data sets). The algorithms constantly evolve as more and more data is run through it. Machine Learning is useful for finding unknown patterns and relationships in data, such as sales, plants, store, or forecasting. It is an effective tool to gain insight and efficiency in day to day operations, while also providing a future forward view.

A guide to pump maintenance and how advances in monitoring can enable predictive maintenance to be forecast up to 12 months in advance.             In this guide we explore 3 types of maintenance practice and how users can look to automate inspection, save time unnecessarily dismantling and inspecting pumps, and further explore in detail what features of remote monitoring users should look to utilize for accurate predictive pump maintenance.

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 

With many people at home either due to the closure of their operations, self-isolation protocols, or as a proactive measure to reduce non-essential staff on site, some might question how these individuals can be productive, particularly when assets are not operating. However, if employees have access to their CMMS/EAM/ERP data systems from home, here are some value-added activities that employees and employers should consider undertaking given the time they now have. Note these are in no particular order as priorities would be context-specific, and specific procedures are omitted for this same reason. 

The desert-bound city of Chandler in the American Southwest operates a municipal infrastructure that includes aging machinery assets at four water treatment facilities and dozens of potable water wells, recharge wells, and pumping stations. The city hired an expert— who happens to be an ICML-certified lubrication technician and oil analyst—to develop predictive maintenance programs intended to extend the reliability and service life of these assets. Though his proposed solutions will take several years to implement fully across the board, the benefits and efficiencies have been felt almost immediately. In this presentation,we’ll provide an overview of the main water treatment facility’s lubrication conditions prior to the expert’s arrival and describe the challenges he regularly faces with regard to environmental conditions, untrained vendors, and corporate culture—even as he harvests low-hanging lubrication fruit within the scope of his broader predictive maintenance mandate. We’ll also highlight his personal emphasis on the valuable role that training and certification play in his program’s success. You’ll understand that best lubrication and oil analysis practices can produce significant ROI for any machinery maintenance program; training and certification contribute greatly to the sustainability of culture change and new processes; and a strategic road map can make implementation more efficient and sellable from the outset.

Mobile devices for recording maintenance and ensuring the most up-to-date procedures and checklists is ideal, but what if there is no wifi where you're working? Until recently, mobile devices had to be connected to the Internet to enable all functionality. Offline Mobile Capability has recently been successfully developed for Nova Scotia Power (NSP) by Megamation. NSP has been using Megamation's DirectLine CMMS for 20 years, which delivers software as a service over the Internet in an all-inclusive, fully supported suite. DirectLine mobile provides a connection between the field and the office through an easy-to-use, full-feature application that works on any cellphone or tablet. Maintenance instructions, checklists, pictures, and the creation of new work orders—as well as other features—can be assessed and updated through the mobile app. Because NSP has numerous remote locations, it required offline mobile capability, so Megamation established a project to meet NSP's needs and successfully launched the new tools in early April 2019. This presentation will demonstrate the technology, share the lessons learned from the design stage through to field implementation, and look at where we're going next.