In today's increasingly competitive marketplace – compounded by a tough economic climate – the pressure is mounting on oil and gas industries to apply best practices that will enable them to achieve the highest uptime, and maximum throughput at lowest cost. In addition, management is required to improve quality and optimize life cycle costs of their capital equipment while assuring safety, reliability, and integrity of their assets.

In a time of uncertainty, such as today, companies must be smart, practical, and prudent when managing their equipment reliability. One management philosophy that has proven both effective and successful during economic downturns is implementing defect elimination methodology and tools.

We define defects, in terms of equipment and capital assets, as anything less than optimum. This would include failures, unwanted events, chronic problems, errors, and potential problems and failures. Specifically, defects consist of leaks, looseness, vibration, excessive heat, missing or broken parts, wrong materials or parts, and can include things like poor or wrong documentation and even improper training of maintenance and operations.

A defect can be introduced during the design phase, installation phase, or operational phase. If defects aren’t eliminated during the design or installation phase, sometimes companies just live with them throughout the operational phase.

Many defects are introduced during the operational phase. Typically these are induced by operational or maintenance practices. To compound the problem, many of the defects are what we call chronic. In other words they occur over and over, never getting repaired or resolved. Chronic defects could be holdovers from the design and installation phase or introduced during the operational phase.

The financial impact of defects is hard to quantify and difficult to measure, but their reduction or elimination represents a significant prize, well worth the effort. One oil and gas company on the west coast of the US developed a defect elimination strategy, which after four years, netted a 22 percent reduction in maintenance costs and a 7 percent increase in availability. This virtually reversed a production decline they were experiencing in their oil and gas wells and also had a tremendous impact on their safety performance.

In a study conducted by DuPont engineers using a computer simulation programme, key maintenance strategies were compared and modelled to understand their impact on plant performance. The strategies reviewed were: planning, scheduling, preventive/predictive maintenance and defect elimination.

The maintenance strategies were introduced one at a time into the computer model. The results were quite remarkable: see table 1.

The model led to an important insight: eliminating sources of defects is a much higher leverage point than simply repairing defects more efficiently. In fact, according to the model, in a reactive maintenance environment with 83.5 percent availability as a baseline, defect elimination alone improves availability by 9.7 percent!

To achieve world-class reliability, develop a defect elimination culture that relentlessly pursues and prevents the introduction of defects and errors at all stages of the equipment life cycle. Furthermore, if defects are being inadvertently introduced into the maintenance process itself, then they should also be eliminated. So the question remains: how is a defect elimination process implemented?

The Improvement Process

There are a number of tools used for defect elimination. The Quality movement which was popularized during the 1980s used Statistical Process Control (SPC) along with an assortment of problem solving tools and continuous improvement methodologies to identify and eliminate defects in the manufacturing processes and eventually these tools were adopted by other types of businesses. In the early 1990s Six Sigma was popularized with the DMAIC problemsolving model, which has been used widely in a number of industries to successfully solve problems and eliminate defects. Tools of this nature were effective at reducing variation and ultimately solving chronic problems that contributed to defects.

Today, companies use everything from simple problem solving tools to Lean/Six Sigma tools and Root Cause Analysis tools for solving problems and ultimately eliminating defects inherent in the processes and systems. In the offshore oil and gas industry, and specifically in the maintenance and reliability function, all these have a place and should be part of a company’s improvement tool kit.

One approach that has proven extremely successful in both the onshore and offshore oil and gas industry is the adoption of a practice straight from the Japanese asset management improvement philosophy called Total Productive Maintenance or TPM. Two of the tenets of TPM are: equipment restoration, which brings the equipment to an optimum state, and defect elimination, which identifies and eliminates all defects related to the equipment and its associated business processes.

The Reliability Improvement

Team The tool that has successfully combined these principles is sometimes called the Reliability Improvement Team or RIT. It has also been called the Equipment Improvement Team (EIT) or Action Team. The premise behind the RIT is to create evident change in a short period of time, such as 12 weeks.

The RIT is a 12-week project to improve reliability and efficiency.

It has been demonstrated in studies and in practice that accomplishing an improvement project in 90 days or less has a positive impact, moving an organization to a more proactive continuous improvement minded culture. When many of these projects are completed in a short period of time at a plant or offshore installation, the net effect will be a substantial improvement in reliability and a reduction in operating costs. An additional benefit will be the emersion of a new culture that strives to eliminate defects that contribute to less than optimum equipment performance.

Experience has shown that in a plant environment, onshore or offshore, one of the most difficult challenges is making tangible improvements to the equipment, which is also observable to the plant team. Many times, improvements are made which are invisible to the majority of the plant team. Improvements such as updated preventative maintenance routines, new BOM’s, or even material changes to a piece of equipment to improve reliability are often invisible to most of the plant team.

Typically, no one knows about these improvements except those immediately involved, such as an engineer, a technician and possibly a supervisor. This will leave many in the team feeling that no progress is being made to improve performance of the plant equipment. Ultimately, this may lead some to believe that the desire to improve plant performance is just lip service by plant leadership. This will leave many in the organization cynical about leaderships’ efforts to improve the business.

The RIT, when completed, becomes a very powerful visual of how things can be in the plant – the desired Future State. Frontline personnel will see a restored piece of equipment that has been optimized and improved. This is much more visible than improvements made in preventative maintenance routines or operational procedures which are important, but sometimes not appreciated, because of their limited visibility.

The optimized and elevated piece of equipment becomes the standard of how the plant team wants to maintain their equipment. Past experience has shown that this can motivate the plant team and create cultural change faster than any other maintenance or reliability improvement effort.

So, the question is how is this process implemented? Figure 1 shows a process flow diagram depicting the flow of activities during the RIT.

The RIT is a 12-week project to improve reliability and efficiency and stabilize the performance of a targeted piece of equipment. The RIT project consists of the following activities:

• Repair of outstanding corrective maintenance backlog
• Root Cause Analysis (RCA) of critical equipment problems
• Training of the operator in Basic Equipment Care (BEC) or Operator Care practices
• Preventative Maintenance Optimization of existing maintenance routines
• Bill of Material updates
• Master Data review and update
• Operational Procedure review and update
• An onsite event designed to identify and correct defects, organize workplace and transfer new skills to the operator

The second part of this article will be released in the issue 4/2015 of Maintworld.

Tracy T. Strawn,

President Oil and Gas Services,

Marshall Institute, Inc.