7.2 Education, Training & Development

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 

How can we be sure our efforts to correct deficiencies are going to derive value for our organization? How many times have we carried out a root cause analysis only for the same problem to pop up somewhere else—obviously, we didn’t address all of the causes. The physical ones, we’re pretty good at, but when it comes to systemic problems, we consistently miss out. Even worse is when we spend a lot of effort solving an issue only to find that it didn’t amount to much. Do we fully understand that our area of focus is the right one? Why is it many times we deal with symptoms and wonder why the problems recur. What is preventing us from dealing with the true causes of our problems? In this session we’ll look at tools that will point us in the right direction and figure out how we can develop them. We’ll look at the standard approaches to arriving at root cause and some that don’t work. Identifying systemic causes seems to provide the best results—why, and why don’t we bother to reach them? Finally, we’ll find the link between a horse’s rear end and the Space Shuttle Challenger, because if we can’t understand the links right in front of us, adding value may be impossible.

If you are working in maintenance, reliability, or asset management, but not involved in ‘pulling wrenches’, then communication is a significant part of doing your job effectively. And even if you are pulling wrenches, communication still is important to your work.

As our organization recently embarked on a digital transformation of our work management processes, it became obvious that what we were actually changing wasn’t just the technology we used—we also had to change our people. We recognized that this change was too big and too important to leave to chance and decided instead to apply a structured, methodical, and deliberate approach. This is a case study in the approach we took and the tools we used to ensure the changes required of our workforce were as painless as possible. We’ll outline how the approach impacted our success and detail the lessons learned. We’ll demonstrate how we approached the following topics: assessing the scope of change, analysis of gaps between present and future states, planning for change, change methodology (ADKAR), roles and responsibilities, where does change fit into project planning, communications, building desire for change, assessment of your change audience, building the knowledge and skills of your audience, and monitoring change progress. The intent of this study is to demonstrate some techniques and tools you can apply to any changes being undertaken, with the hope that you can help to “grease the wheels” of change within your own organization.

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.

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.

One major challenge at the operate and maintain phase of an asset is achieving and sustaining the forecasted availability and reliability as intended at the project delivery phase. Many problems arise—equipment failures, underperformance, high costs—that are caused by numerous issues. The resolution demands thorough understanding of the causes of the issues, which we usually attempt to achieve through RCA methodologies. I've experienced many repeated failures even when RCAs have been conducted, due, mainly, to most of the RCAs focusing attention on solutions to the problem outcomes with limited focus on the human and system causes that drive the outcomes. The Causal Learning Approach brings in the understanding of these other causes that ensure effective and sustainable solutions development. There are three levels of causes: the physical outcomes; the human causes; and the system causes. The Causal Learning Approach also focuses on causal reasoning instead of defensive and solution reasoning. This presentation will provide the understanding of these causes and the three key elements of this approach: discovery, learning, and solution generation.

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.

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.

There are many new lubricants, bearings, seals, and lube accessories, but we need to do better. Ninety percent of rolling element bearings don’t reach their design life, and the main contributing factors relate to lubrication. This can mean the wrong type, too much, too little, not often enough, or not applied right. Generally, such things can be easily corrected, but a learning, productive working environment is key. Similar to hydraulics, the leading cause of equipment issues is contamination. This can be water, dirt, and/or wear. In this presentation, we’ll give you a number of examples and study results, as well as present some solutions.