safe work practices including permits and LOTO and improve job satisfaction and employee morale.
An implementation plan was developed by the team to achieve examples like the following items:
The team defined roles and responsibilities to ensure that maintenance became a site issue.
Planning and scheduling processes required operations to be more involved with work order generation.
The interface between operations and maintenance added communication for setting priorities, safety, equipment preparation, and needs to keep all parties informed.
The integration of engineering and maintenance resource scheduling reduced the number of contractors for the plant.
Day-ahead planning evolved into a weekly scheduling process including a backlog of ready-to-schedule jobs.
Predictive reliability technologies were implemented and incorporated to provide proactive feedback on equipment status.
Vibration monitoring was performed by maintenance.
A site-certified welding program was implemented to increase mechanical capabilities.
A vendor alliance was created for all storeroom purchases.
Once a true partnership was created, the results demonstrated the value added by the plant’s efforts:
The site transitioned from areas to central maintenance with site priorities set for overall assignment of resources.
The plant implemented a planning and scheduling process with 200% improvement in the percentage of planned work completed as scheduled the first year.
The plant implemented a crew team process to drive improvement projects at the mechanic level with documented savings.
Engineering project resource needs were integrated into the maintenance scheduling process.
The coordination of technical support resources to eliminate problem areas through RCFA removed defects that improved run-times.
The use of vendor alliances reduced spare parts costs.
The site incorporated the use of value-adding reliability technologies such as vibration monitoring, lubrication, and digital reproduction.
A site performance management program to drive site-wide cost savings resulted in $1.92 million documented project savings for the first year.
The site reduced M&R as a percentage of the asset replacement value (% ARV) from 4.98% to 3.63% in the first year with plans to continue improvements.
The new planning and scheduling processes broke the reactive work cycle by enforcing execution of the scheduled jobs. Some of the tools that were used are provided at www.maintenanceinsanity.com for you to try as part of your improvement process. Figure 1.2 declares that schedule breaking is prohibited and gives the only acceptable reasons to ever break your schedule. Prior to breaking the schedule, be sure to try and mitigate the situation with alternative options first.
The maintenance manager stated: “The big success resulted from the reorganization with new roles to enhance communication. Operations now believes that they need maintenance to succeed or we all fail. We now fully utilize our resources before going outside for help.” His conclusion was that the yearlong effort was worth the reward:
Maintenance spend decreased by 18% ($7.39 million versus $6.06 million).
There was a 27% improvement in M&R as % ARV.
Maintenance FTE (full-time equivalent) was reduced from 57.3 to 37.4 with up to 6.3 FTE used for capital. Operating asset utilization increased by 16.6%.
Work processes were implemented to increase schedule compliance (26% to 85%) and reduce E-jobs (emergency jobs), going from more than 100 to less than 10 per week.
Pump run-time between failures increased from 13 to 26 months.
Maintenance and operations work together with joint ownership of plant assets.
No matter what your present status may be, there is always room for improvement. Take the needed actions to address all areas of concern. To change, start by being discontented with where you are now and quit doing the same thing over and over.
Next, we will give more food for thought to see if you recognize the need for change in the insanity situations shared and see how it might relate to your own situation.