Have you been involved in implementing a new computer system that “will improve maintenance by 50 percent” but so far it hasn’t made any improvements? Have you seen projects where a consultant from one of the BIG consulting companies was brought in to decrease maintenance costs and yet a year later, somehow, the cost is higher than before?

The company may have started a major training program in reliability and maintenance but there is no improvement to show for that either. Or maybe a decision was made to change the organizational structure where maintenance employees report in small units of the Operations organization.

Could it be the changes in your organization have led to a lack of training and vision for reliability—the maintenance technicians are expected to repair the equipment as soon as possible instead of practicing prevention and condition monitoring. Part of the change was to put all maintenance technicians on shifts so that repairs could be done faster, which led to many parts of the preventive maintenance and condition monitoring tasks being left behind. Have you been a part of outsourcing maintenance to contractors?

Figure 1: IDCON's Circle of Continuous Improvement

Have you noticed an increase in the number of equipment breakdowns since you started to use contractors?

Hopefully, you haven’t seen all these pain points in your organization.

What is needed?

How do you focus on reliability and maintenance to ensure that there are value added improvements in throughput and that unit cost decreases? It comes down to some of these fundamentals:

Improved planning of work

• Improved equipment technical data and Bill of Materials
• Improved scheduling of daily and weekly work orders
• An optimized PM system
• Technicians trained on the equipment and instrumentation
• Organized spare parts
• Input on new equipment and projects to improve reliability and maintainability

You are sitting in meetings all day long, and we know that nobody can stay focused in that situation.
There are two things that will improve maintenance! What I mean by improving maintenance is improving reliability and lowering the total cost.

Everything we do in maintenance leads back to TWO things:

Prevent failures, which extends the life of the equipment

Find failures early and make efficient repairs safely and of high quality

How do we get to this state of being good at two things? Maintenance and reliability are built on several key processes, and these need to be implemented and executed with discipline and rigor. 

1. Prevent failures, which extends the life of the equipment
2. Find failures early and make efficient repairs safely and of high quality

How do we get to this state of being good at two things? Maintenance and reliability are built on several key processes, and these need to be implemented and executed with discipline and rigor.

IDCON Circle of Continuous Improvement

Market and Production Plan: You are a successful manufacturer, and the market wants more of your products. The market drives the plant’s production plan. There are other players competing on the market that are putting pressure on you to lower cost per unit and improve quality. 

Maintenance Planning and Scheduling: The plant is operating at max capacity and every time equipment is down, quality specifications are not met, or the speed (performance) goes down, revenue is decreased and sometimes delivery dates are missed for customer orders. This puts a lot of pressure on Production Planning and the Maintenance Planning and Scheduling process. Because of the market opportunity and the pressure to compete, Operations and Maintenance have started to work in a close partnership to make sure that the production and maintenance schedules are well coordinated.

Preventative Maintenance and Condition Monitoring: The plant is currently trying to improve the Overall Equipment Efficiency (OEE) from 72% to 85%. This increase is valued at $50 million in additional revenue. It should also be noted that the calculation indicates that using the same amount of resources with improved OEE will decrease cost per unit, since fixed cost will be spread over more units. Increasing OEE strategically points to improving maintenance work, specifically decreasing corrective maintenance and breakdowns. It is best if we can set up work processes to prevent repairs altogether. We can prevent failures with good lubrication, correct installation, cleaning, good operating practices and correct design of equipment. 

To enable Planning and Scheduling of maintenance work (in addition to coordination with the production plan) there must be good Condition Monitoring (inspections) of equipment. Condition Monitoring provides lead time for Planning and Scheduling by finding failures early before they develop into breakdowns. The failures found by Condition Monitoring should be prioritized according to defined priority rules.

There is now a project to utilize machine learning that installs sensors and downloads software for some of the manufacturing equipment. Craftspeople and Reliability Engineers have already started to use that information to improve their PM programs by identifying and correcting conditions that eventually lead to failure of components. In fact, the maintenance organization has direct access to the machine learning database while they are inspecting, troubleshooting, or trying to find the root cause of a failure on their tablets and laptops.

Technical Database: In an effort to improve OEE, Maintenance realized that there must be a good technical database and stores to enable effective planning. The technical database that includes OEM helps the planner find instructions, materials, spares, and technical specifications. Information such as clearances, set points, torque specs, etc. needs to be included in the work order packages. Stores must be well organized to protect the condition of parts. The Bill of Materials, as part of a technical database, must be complete and up to date to ensure that information is known, and correct parts are allocated to the job. This process will decrease the amount of time spent tracking down manuals, ordering parts and executing corrective maintenance work, allowing us to focus on improving OEE.

Do: Once the job is planned and scheduled, the repair is executed at high quality. The craftspeople meet with the supervisor for 15 minutes in the morning to see if there are any changes to the schedule. The schedule is posted in the maintenance shop, but all the craftspeople have the schedule up on their tablets. The schedule shows start and stop times of each job and downtime of equipment coordinated with Operations and agreed upon by the Operations and Maintenance Coordinator (OMC). The OMC is the one point of contact between Maintenance and Operations.

Record: After the work is completed, the job history is recorded in the CMMS. Recording work order history will answer: What was the problem? What was done to repair the problem? How can it be prevented in the future? The craftsperson has the flexibility to do this though their tablet, phone, or laptop. Since craftspeople update the work order history daily, the maintenance schedule is up to date in real time. This helps the maintenance supervisor to update the weekly and daily schedule and manage the resources more effectively.

Continuous Improvements: Equipment history can be analysed for continuous improvement actions through the Root Cause Problem Elimination (RCPE) process. The RCPE process analyses history by looking at equipment and components with costly and repetitive repairs. Once the root of the costly and repetitive repairs is known, corrective actions can be planned and scheduled. The organization takes pride in its problem-solving skills and eliminating equipment problems. The Reliability Engineer gives out a monthly summary report describing which root causes have been eliminated, including the worth measured in dollars.

Circle of Despair: Of course, the circle of continuous improvement is not always followed. Break-in work happens because we react to an emergency (or perceived emergency) and subsequently the equipment is subject to poor-quality repairs causing us to go back to the same job. This does not mean that the technician made a mistake when doing the repair, but that the root cause problem was not eliminated. Therefore, the circle of despair is often repeated over and over. To break the circle of despair, you must focus on those two things: preventing failures that extend the life of the equipment and finding failures early to make efficient repairs safely and of high quality.

Define the Two Things

Now, when we have laid out the Core or Fundamental System, you must define how to implement and manage the two things.

The first thing: Prevention. What is that? Your own health may be an example of how you think about prevention. You might eat healthily, exercise, spend time outdoors, have fun and challenge your brain. Each one of these tasks can help prevent mental and physical deterioration. To draw the parallel with equipment in processes, manufacturing and facilities, prevention includes the following:

• Cleaning of equipment
• Lubrication
• Operation practices
• Design for reliability
• Alignment
• Balancing
• Calibration
• Storage and transportation of equipment and parts
• Precision maintenance following specifications during repairs and installation

All the above tasks lead to healthy and extended life of the equipment.

The second thing is the process of Work Management. Work management can be described as “the chain that cannot be broken.” The chain (as shown in the picture below) or work management process is a simplified view of the Circle of Continuous Improvement.

Work management includes the process of Preventive Maintenance, condition monitoring (inspecting) to find failures early to get lead time for planning and scheduling, which will minimize the impact on operations. The next step is to plan work to provide a job plan that is efficient, high quality and safe. When the job is planned, we can schedule to determine when and who is going to do the work. The last step is to provide seamless execution according to the planned and scheduled work.

You must ask yourselves, how well are we executing each step in the chain?

Guide to Leadership and Two More Things

Now, here are two more things for you to make it happen. Let’s say that you have implemented the chain of work management, but you are still treading water.

A well-built work management system requires great leadership to be effective. Maintenance processes rely on people to follow the process and execution of the work. Your ability to motivate and lead people will be a big part of your road to success. Motivating your organization comes down to having a vision of the future state, communicating that vision on a regular basis, and seeing actual progress. You must involve the organization in implementing these additional two things and reward them when they succeed. You must also practice what you preach and show the organization that you know what is going on daily by measuring performance.

If there are roadblocks you need to remove them, and if there are performance issues you must deal with them quickly. Leadership also includes creating partnerships and agreements with Operations and other important stakeholders. Remind yourself that the first line of maintenance starts with the operators running the process.

Owe Forsberg, 

IDCON,
Vice President.