Читать книгу The ''Maintenance Insanity'' Cure: Practical Solutions to Improve Maintenance Work - Roger D. Lee - Страница 12
ОглавлениеTo help you feel better about your present situation, I will share a couple observations to show “what good does not look like”:
A Chinese plant did not have any wind socks because it looked at its distillation columns to tell which way the wind was blowing by the direction they swayed.
A plant in Alabama would switch from the primary pump to the spare one and run it until it failed before repairing either one. This plant also waited each morning for yesterday’s lab results to see what products it had made in its batch operations the day before (it was trying to make what was ordered but had to wait for lab results).
Feel better now? Both of these facilities were stuck in the insanity rut.
An example of a success story occurred at a co-polyester chemical plant in Malaysia. After two years of services, the demand for its product was increasing, but the plant’s reliability and work processes prevented it from meeting the new demand level. This example gives you an idea of how bad things can get if the proper start-up training and processes are not adequate to prepare your people for future growth.
We collected basic plant information to define the problems needing to be resolved. We learned that:
Product demand was increasing plant capacity requirements to go from 60% to 95%.
The plant design uptime was 340 days per year with only three unscheduled outages.
During the second year of operations, the plant ran a total of 180 days with 25 unscheduled outages and produced 2.5 million kg of off-class materials versus 1.1 million kg design. The plant’s best consecutive days’ run was 21 days, but its typical runs were 5 to 7 days before an unplanned shutdown occurred.
Outage durations ranged from 5 to 60 days to get the plant back into operation. The molten plastic product will solidify in the piping if corrective actions are not taken within a couple of hours of an upset.
An improvement program was developed to achieve the following objectives for this site:
Achieve 100-day runs to get back to design conditions.
Reduce maintenance spend to improve plant profitability.
Improve plant equipment reliability while building employee capability.
Create and implement maintenance processes to organize and add structure to daily operations and maintenance interactions.
Create a successful site team effort involving all employees and functional groups with decisions made at the lowest appropriate level at the optimum times.
Identify and resolve reliability improvements opportunities.
Standardize safe work practices including permitting and lock-out tag-out (LOTO) procedures.
Change the site culture to improve job satisfaction and employee morale.
A two-man team completed a site assessment including interviews with all functions to build our presentation to obtain management commitment. Plant-wide communications were given to share the plan and strategy, including metrics to be tracked. An update schedule was established to monitor success during implementation.
During the first few weeks, we established a Site Leadership Team with a subteam for daily operations and maintenance interactions. New roles and responsibilities were shared for all functions and levels. New work processes that focused on planning and scheduling were rolled out. Expert resources were brought in to identify and resolve reliability problems. A major effort was focused on operator and mechanic skill enhancement. The initial Malaysia apprenticeship program training had been too general in nature for developing the required skills needed. It was a governmental program to train local farmers and fishermen to become industrial operators and mechanics. Subject-matter experts were brought in from similar operating plants in other locations to deliver on-the-job and classroom materials. Troubleshooting and decision making were critical skills due to the nature of the product being produced.
One immediate change was made to impact accountability and to provide consequences. Prior to this intervention, the operators had no duties associated with plant cleanout of pluggage once the plastic set up in the lines. The operators were given required training to allow them to serve as helpers with the cleanout crews. It was now more important to them to keep the plant running.
To share progress and sustain our results, an annual milestone plan was created and shared with all employees so they could see the impact of their actions. Our training program emphasized troubleshooting and problem-solving techniques with hands-on demonstrations, preventive task skills, and strategies for building confidence for decision making. Operational and maintenance process management and condition monitoring programs were put in place.
Within the first year, technical support resolved the reliability issues with the steam boiler, electrical power supply, and extruder/cutters pluggage. We added a multiskilled mechanic to each operating shift to address emergencies and evaluate identified requests to determine appropriate course of action (faster decisions and actions taken). At the start of the new processes, the plant achieved its first run of 58 days with a scheduled outage for boiler improvements and a second run of 105 days with scheduled shutdown due to high inventory. The site’s maintenance and repair (M&R) costs were reduced by 49.93% after a full year of the new processes compared with the first two years’ costs. This change resulted in a savings of $1.27 million realized in annual M&R spend. Key changes that produced these results included a planning process that required a work order to be written for all requests, key positions (planner, maintenance and safety coordinators for operations, and stores attendant) were selected from site employees, day-ahead planning evolved into a weekly scheduling process, predictive reliability technologies were implemented and incorporated into operator rounds with feedback to maintenance, and OJT (on-the-job training) built employee capabilities and confidence.
The plant’s “maintenance insanity” cure is shown by the site manager’s quote, “Prior to R&M intervention, we were not able to even get done today what needed doing. How could we possibly have time to improve? We were very skeptical of the changes they wanted to make. Now looking back after 4 years, and seeing the real results we’ve achieved, we are all believers.”
The changes that he is referencing included
Maintenance spend decreased by 50%; plant reliability increased by 500%.
The capability of site employees improved to allow timely decisions with appropriate corrective actions.
Work processes were implemented to allow repeat 100-day runs.
Design conditions for product quality were surpassed.
Maintenance and operations work together with joint ownership of plant assets, and overall job satisfaction improved for all functions.
This example is for a union resin plant that had been in operations since 1949 and changed owners several times until our client bought it in 2001. We put a team together for operations and maintenance to improve run-time and reliability issues. Figure 1.1 shows the typical layout of chemical batch plant operations.
Problem definition included the following areas:
The site maintenance organization was not fully defined.
There was not a concentrated effort to ensure maintenance provided best value to the site (work was given out more to keep everyone busy).
The plant did not have a formal daily planning and scheduling process.
The majority of work consisted of break-ins and emergency work (no real definition for emergency).
The planners were not being fully utilized to do detailed planning.
The majority of work requests were being written by maintenance (not operations).
Communication between operation and maintenance was limited, and there was no true partnership relationship.
The maintenance group lacked management processes for its contract support resources.
FIGURE 1.1 Batch chemical plant that broke its insanity cycle
For problem solving, there was limited interface between maintenance and engineering.
The objectives for this improvement process were to:
Reduce maintenance spend.
Improve plant reliability.
Build site employee capability.
Implement maintenance processes to organize and add structure to daily operations and maintenance interactions.
Create a successful site team effort involving all employees and functional groups with decisions made at the lowest appropriate level.
Identify and resolve reliability improvement opportunities.
Standardize 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.
FIGURE 1.2 Enforce schedule compliance—another insanity cure
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.
