Maintenance Strategies. A preview of the results from the Eight Critical Elements of Asset Management Survey

Maintenance Strategies.
A strategy is the who, what, when where and how of maintaining your assets. Strategies are not “set and forget”, they are living documents that should be reviewed and improved continuously. What methods do you use to review strategies? Do the strategies address the failure modes of your assets? Who is involved in the review process? The review and development of strategies is a critical component of Asset Management.

In years gone by, when maintenance labor was plentiful, there were some very extensive Planned maintenance programs in place, with most being based on the “best guess” of the experienced people in the business. The results were often a plant that was being over serviced or the servicing was occurring on equipment that had very low failure rates. In the last 20 years there has been a significant movement to actions being based on the mitigation of failure modes. Some of these tools are breifly described below.

Tools for Improving Maintenance strategies.
A tool is anything used as a means of accomplishing a task or purpose. The following generic tools are used widely in determining new or revising existing Maintenance Strategies.

Reliability Centred Maintenance. RCM
Reliability Centred Maintenance is defined by John Moubray as “a process used to determine what must be done to ensure that the physical asset continues to fulfil its intended functions in its present operating context” (1993, pg.7). RCM was born from the airline industry in the US in the early 70’s in response to the statutory maintenance requirements that had to be applied to larger aircraft such as Boeings 747. It was determined that the cost of applying the standards to these aircraft would make them uneconomical to operate (Smith and Hinchcliffe, 2004). The basis of RCM is to ensure equipment maintains its function and the process requires that the following seven questions be answered (Moubray, 1993).
1. What is the function of the equipment and what are the required performance standards?
2. In what ways can it fail to perform its function?
3. What could cause each functional failure?
4. What happens when the failure occurs?
5. In what way does the failure matter?
6. What can be done to prevent the failure?
7. What has to be done if the failure can’t be prevented?
Smith and Mobley (2008) highlight the following types of asset management strategies that may be developed from an RCM process.
1. Condition based tasks. E.g. Oil is sampled from a transformer and the results of the analysis determine if further maintenance is required.
2. Scheduled restoration. E.g. A Sheave bank running in a corrosive environment that requires overhaul at fixed intervals.
3. Scheduled Discard. E.g. The replacement of oil in a combustion engine.
4. Failure finding task. E.g. Calibration of instrumentation. The fault may not be discovered until the calibration is done.
5. One-time change. Typically a one off redesign.
RCM in its pure form is a resource hungry process that should only be applied to the most critical of assets. The results from the process if performed properly and coupled with assessment of historical failures will produce efficient and effective maintenance strategies, but this will be at the expense of a significant amount of time for plant staff and the project analyst.
Failure Modes and Effects Analysis. FMEA.
A Failure Mode and Effects Analysis is an integral part of the RCM process and deals with questions 2, 3 and 4 of the 7 RCM questions listed above. Teng and Ho (1996) define FMEA as a technique that identifies the potential failure modes of a device or product, determines the effects of these failures and assesses the criticality of the failure.

An FMEA completed on DC machines in an Australian Steel mill revealed the following most likely causes of DC machine failure to be:
1. Contamination of motor by Dust, Dirt fumes etc.
2. Inadequate maintenance practices. (Internal and contract)
3. Inadequate brush tension
4. Over tensioning of belts or shaft misalignment.
5. Overheating due to ineffective ventilation
6. Neutral axis and compounding issues.
7. Overloading.
8. Inadequate lubrication (Too much or not enough).
9. Incorrect or ineffective protection devices.
These findings were used to improve the existing PM’s with excellent results. Over a 3 year period there was a 70% reduction in DC motors that failed in service.


Planned Maintenance Optimisation. PMO
Planned Maintenance Optimisation is a process where existing PM inspections and failure history are used to form the basis of a new set of strategies. This can provide a similar output to classical RCM in far less time. As unknown failure modes are not addressed in the first instance the process allows for input of potential failure modes after the initial assessment. This process couples the PMO top down approach with the RCM bottom up approach and in many cases will be the best option for mature businesses with existing PM systems and access to failure history. New businesses with no existing systems or failure history will need to apply more classical methods such as a RCM or a knowledge based process.
Management support of strategy optimization.
The most significant step related to gathering management support for a strategy review process is educating them in the critical elements of asset management. It is common for managers to see maintenance as a cost that can be cut, and not an investment in the future of the operation. Question 57 is aimed at gauging whether management support the review of, and optimization of maintenance strategies.

Question 57.


The results here were surprising with 54% rating a 4 or a 5. This indicates management have a clear understanding of the importance of optimisation of maintenance strategies. A further 30% support strategy review but do not have a clear understanding of the benefits. With this high level of management support there should be little reason not to progress with improvements.

Scheduled review of strategies.
How many businesses have been using the same strategies with little or no review processes in the last 10 years? When your tradesmen suggest a change to a strategy is there a system in place to review the suggestion for suitability? There needs to be a systems in place to review older PM’s to determine if they are still relevant and are addressing known or potential failure modes.
There also needs to be a system in place to capture and review feedback gathered from the tradesmen who are doing the task. One of the most significant contributors to work instructions not having any feedback left on them is that when comments had been made before, no actions followed. This is an incredible demotivator for many. Question 58 will determine how often maintenance strategies are reviewed.

Question 58.


With 39% of respondents scoring a 4 or a 5 the level of formal review of strategies was higher than expected. 52% of respondents indicated a less formal or more ad-hoc manner of strategy review, with 9% having no process at all. To remove the waste from maintenance strategies and ensure actions within these strategies are effective a process involving the identification and mitigation of failure modes must be applied. This can be in the form of FMEA, RCM, and PMO etc. The other point to remember is that strategies will need to be changed to accommodate changing production demands. For this reason, a formal review schedule should be put in place. This could be in the form of regular audits of work instructions or detailed reviews of total strategies.

Maintenance supervisors and strategy review.
With strategy review being a critical component of this element, it becomes clear that someone needs to be responsible for the review process. Question 59 questions whether the development and review of Maintenance strategies is included in the job responsibilities of Maintenance supervisors.

Question 59.


The telling result here is that 39% of maintenance supervisors that review their strategies in an ad-hoc manner and a further 30% that do little review or none at all. With only 31% scoring a 4 or 5 this is an area of significant opportunity for many businesses.
Include the review of maintenance strategies in the job goals of maintenance supervisors at all levels. The Maintenance Team Leader may be responsible for feedback on work instructions, the Area Supervisors could arrange regular work instruction audits, where the maintenance manager may include large formal strategy review processes in the maintenance budget. Making people responsible for strategy review will make it occur and the benefits will come.


Involvement in Strategy review.
An effective strategy review process will only occur if a representative of all stakeholders are involved in the process. This will gain a significant amount of local knowledge as well as building ownership of any revised strategy. Questions 60 will determine to what degree operations and maintenance employees are involved in the development of strategies.

Question 60.


What is pleasing here is that 35% of respondents indicated that operations and maintenance personnel are regularly or always involved in strategy review. 32% of respondents indicated some input while 33% have little or no involvement. The aim here should be that there is always involvement with stakeholders. When strategy review processes occur in isolation it is unlikely that the outcome will be as best as it could be, as one persons view will be not uncover all possible failure modes or the actions that will prevent the failures. The ideal situation is to have a senior mechanical fitter, an electrician, an operator and maintenance leader involved in the review process. The important aspect here is to get a total understanding as to what failures occur and whether the actions currently occurring address these failures. If no actions are currently in place the group should decide on what actions to implement, and making these decisions as a group will build ownership of the strategy. It is worthwhile considering the use of a strategy review tool and experienced facilitator during these reviews.

Maintenance strategies and the CMMS.
If you have a CMMS, it will have the ability to store and manage the work instructions that are working documents of your asset management strategies. Question 61 is aimed at understanding the level at which strategies and work instructions are stored in the CMMS.

Question 61.


With only 40% scoring a 4 or a 5 in this question there is clear room for improvement. As your CMMS is generally made to manage your strategies it is the obvious this is where they should be kept. If there are some work instructions or operating procedures that are kept in other systems, then these should be linked to the CMMS. This may be the case if a third party is providing software tools to help with strategy development.

More sections of this survey will be posted in the blog over the next few weeks.

An excellent article on safe electrical testing

This article from Fluke via reliable the plant website is a must read for electrical workers. In my industry we have moved on from alot of this thinking, but old habits die hard.


http://www.reliableplant.com/article.aspx?articleid=21602&pagetitle=10+dumb+things+smart+people+do+when+testing+electricity

SAP. An excellent system...at a cost!

I attended the SAP PM conference on the Gold Coast Australia mid November, and as usual found the content varied in quality, however I came away thinking that I had learned something from this event which has been running for over a decade.

The most interesting information was related to the advancements coming with the new SAP gui and the endless amount of add on tools that are being developed to complement SAP, many of which were presented at the conference.

The common feeling myself and some of my colleagues had after attending a presentation or visiting a vendor was, "That looks really great, but I expect it will cost too much". I then walked away disappointed in that any of these advances are not likely to be seen for some time as they have to be applied at a corperate level at significant cost.

I would like to here of any tips or tricks that utilise SAP PM' s standard functionality, that can be applied locally and only cost time?

What standards do you accept in relation to safety?

I was lucky enough to be able to take some time out in Cairns this month, which is located in Tropical far North Queensland in Australia. (For non Aussies) Cairns is a base for a fleet of large boats that take people out to the Great Barrier Reef every day. I gotta say, if you get a chance to do this it is really worthwhile.

So what has this got to do with Safety?

I dont spend a lot of time around boats so it was interesting to me to watch the practices of the crew which do everything from run the boat through to serving the passengers. While standing on a large floating platform that had hand rails all round, I watched a crew member climb over the hand rail, stand on the side of the pontoon and time his jump onto another boat that was tied up but pitching badly. He then ran to the nearest handrail climbed rapidly up a verticle ladder, while the whole time the boat was pitching all over the place. A minute later he did exactly the same in reverse. Now I'm sure he had done this many times before, but the margin for error was enormous. If he had slipped while jumping he could very easily been squashed between two boats, or bashed his head on the side of the boat. Being a manager who has safety embedded in my brain, I should have questioned what he was doing, but been complacent in an environment I was not used to, I said nothing. ( Not so good)

Would we accept this behavior in industry? This sort of behavior at my work place would have started a safety inquisition, final warnings given and communication to the world. In hindsight I believe when this sort of behavior is accepted in any workplace, it is only time until the big disaster occurs. They really aren't looking after their own.

On the other hand the processes for ensuring all customers are accounted for at the end of the day are exceptional. All passengers sign on when boarding, and countersign when they enter the boat for the return journey. After that two crew members do an independent count to ensure all are on-board. What a great system, so why do they look after their customers so well?

For those Aussies, you may remember a few years back two Americans were left behind on a reef excursion and never found again.

It shouldn't take a disaster to ensure excellent safety system are in place. A culture of safety must be embedded in organisations.

What does a good CMMS look like?

Your CMMS is your maintenance management database, and like any database, if the input is bad the output will also be bad. A well utilised and managed CMMS is an invaluable tool that should be in close alignment with Work Management system. What does a good CMMS look like?

A Fictional example.

In a great step forward from management an experienced Reliability Engineer was hired to help improve plant reliability. The first task for this Engineer was to determine the equipment that causing the biggest losses for the business. Having had a CMMS in use for a number of years this was the obvious place to start. The first place to look was the breakdown data and this was easy to locate as all breakdown work requests had been tagged in the CMMS. The breakdown crew had been trained well in the use of the CMMS and each breakdown had been coded appropriately, which made it easy work to pareto chronic losses. The next place to look was high cost areas, so a work order cost report was run which spilt the costs against the equipment hierarchy. Because the equipment hierarchy had been structure well and all relevant hours and materials had been booked against the correct area most of the time, a picture of high cost items was developed quickly. Matching the chronic losses and costly repairs over the last 12 months it was easy to find where the effort needed to be applied, so task briefs were raised so maintenance planners could begin planning some critical repairs and Engineering could prepare some capital submissions.

The planners developed a plan in the CMMS for the repairs by estimating hours and purchasing materials, which were easy to find as they had all be catalogued and put in bills of materials. In a few instances the planning had already been done as the work had been done before, and the job had been saved as a task list in the CMMS. When all materials were avaliable for the task the scheduler reviewed his list of work orders from within the CMMS, checked his labor availability through the automated connection to the HR module, and then matched the labor to the task that would be completed in the following week. In the following week, all task were completed as they had been planned so well, the planner closed off all the tasks in the CMMS and this data was now captured for reporting. At the end of the week a PM compliance measure of 100% was reported, and planning accuracy was spot on. The capital work was still in the approval stage, but at least all the maintenance work was completed on time and to budget.

Is this how it works at your workplace?

RELIABILTY AND SAFETY. CAN YOU HAVE ONE WITHOUT THE OTHER?

Rod O’Connor. Mast. MM.

We have all heard how people say that planned work is safer than working reactively. If we were to explore this scenario by role-playing a day in the life of two organisations; one that is planned and in control versus the other that is a highly reactive business.

But first, when we say “reactive”, what does this really mean? In short, reactive maintenance is characterised by practices such as running the equipment until it fails and very little preventative maintenance performed. The maintenance department predominantly works on breakdowns and are usually in emergency crisis for the majority of their time. Its common characteristics are that it is unplanned and urgent. A more stringent view of reactive maintenance is work you didn't plan to do on a Monday morning, but had to do before the next Monday.

Let us visualise the scenario of a Monday morning in the life of the two organisations, one planned and the other reactive. The organisation that is planned will have a fair proportion, around 80% (if they are very good), of their week’s work planned and scheduled. They know that they have a fairly hazardous job to complete on a specific day of the week, which involves the use of contractors working at heights and in a confined space. The planner, who is trained in the procedures of confined space work and has planned many a confined space job, has all the necessary steps prepared, including an agreed off-line duration with production. The isolation has been planned, the risks associated with the job have been assessed and control measures put in place. All the necessary labour, materials and equipment are ready – i.e. gas monitors (to monitor the atmosphere), safety and rescue gear (bottled air, harnesses, davits, etc). He has pre-organised the relevant safety personnel to be on standby for the job – i.e. a safety person trained in first aid, the company’s rescue people have been notified of the pending job, etc. Everyone is fairly confident as to the safe execution of the job.

By contrast, the reactive organisation will not know what work will surface during the course of the week. As bad luck would have it, they are off to a bad start already with several breakdowns consuming all of their labour. Just when they thought things could not get any worse, they get a call to tell them that the plant has stopped due to a major breakdown in which repairs are required within a confined space. Most of their fitters are trained in confined space procedures, be it no one tradesman utilises their skills regularly. They have to improvise and shuffle a couple of jobs around to tackle this higher priority job. Nothing is prepared so they set about organising the job, all the time whilst the plant should be running, so they are under a fair bit of pressure to get things on-line again.

The second scenario may seem a little dramatic, but in reality, this is what actually happens in reactive organisations. Inefficiencies aside, if there were to be an accident within one of the above scenarios, it is a fair bet that it would be in the organisation that is reactive.

A recent survey Reliability and Maintenance II: Safety and Reactive Maintenance (n.d.), supports the above statement in that it claims 66% of all respondents from various organisations estimated that more than 60% of incidents occurred when a maintenance job is executed reactively.

So if you are passionate about improving the reliability within your business and having trouble convincing upper management as to the benefits, then make sure that you articulate the ties to safety and reliability. A safe business is a reliable business is a profitable business. You cannot have one without the others.

Gaining support for Asset Management Improvements

Back in the good old days which wasn't all that long ago our management only saw maintenance as a cost and didn't understand the reasons behind poor reliability of their processes. To gain management support the reliability issues had to be put in their face; meaning take them to where the problem was occuring and explain what we should be doing. Acting on issues led to belief that a difference could made. A great example was an automated cleaning line process that was consistantly having major breakdowns in excess of 8 hours. The control system was also unreliable with regular short stoppages that drove operators crazy. Data was gathered to highlight where the issues were, and actions were put in place to improve the maintenance startegies and upgrade the redundant control system. To help gain team support most of the activities involved the team from reviewing startegies to having input into control system upgrades.

The out come was the reduction of significant breakdowns from around once a month to once a year. The chnages to the control system reduced stoppages that require operator intervention by over 80%. The effect on R and M costs were that the cost per tonne dropped by 30% over a 5 year period.

Support from Mangement and the team had been earned. The problem now is that people have short memories so you have to continually work at it.