Maintenance and Reliability
In all manufacturing industries, but especially in heavy asset industries such as Mining and Metals, Chemicals and Oil & Gas, equipment availability is one of the most significant value drivers. The lost value when an asset is off-line is, however, commonly underestimated by a large margin. Not only is the cost of fixing the asset generally significant but, more often than not, the forfeited or slow production results in an even bigger deficit in output and contribution margin.
A common response is to throw money at the problem by buying more spares or employing more skilled workers or contractors in order to react more quickly. These actions treat the symptoms, not the causes.
Understanding the drivers of your M&R performance is key to saving organizations from poor asset availability, spiraling costs and constant firefighting.
All our clients are keenly aware that they need to improve the effectiveness of their maintenance regimes to improve their asset management performance, reduce their M&R costs and bring greater calm to their organization. That requires an understanding of aspects such as:
- Actual own and contractor “tool-time” and the contributors to lost working time
- Mean time between failure (MTBF), maintenance costs, emergency work, average maintenance costs – bad actors
- Knowledge of the conditions of critical items – condition monitoring aka. predictive maintenance
- Patterns of failure
- Logistics (of people, parts, procedures, paper, practices)
Knowing what needs to be done is one thing. Knowing where to start, how to start, how to change the culture and what is critically important and in what order to ensure success, is something else altogether.
How dss+ approaches M&R
When working with our clients, we always assess the starting point, the base line maintenance maturity and the true cost implications of the current performance. This helps both our clients and dss+ evaluate the current system and personnel capabilities, and identify what requires attention. Knowing this, we can determine the genuine priorities and how to design the journey from current state to future performance aspiration.
Areas we look at with clients include:
- Actual availability vs. reported availability
- Maintenance planning, scheduling & execution
- Spare parts management
- Contractor management
- Cost management
- Organization setting and cross-functional work
- Performance management
- People management
- MARC (Maintenance and Repair Contracts) – optional
We review the organization’s maturity on each of these aspects and evaluate how successful current practices are at delivering the needs for the current asset base. We cover:
- Systematic troubleshooting
- Identification of savings opportunities & increased value extraction
- Spare parts and supply chain optimization by aligning inventory management with operating/maintenance strategy
- Planning & scheduling improvements
- Embedding of continuous improvement in the management operating system
- Development of maintenance plans
What Does the dss+ M&R Framework Achieve?
The benefits of this approach include:
- Increased asset reliability and availability
- Lower annual variable costs
- Reduced planned and unplanned downtime with benefits for unit production costs
- Improved shutdown planning to reduce frequency, compress duration, or both
- Condition monitoring to cut down the replacement frequency of high-cost items (e.g. valves, pumps)
- Improved maintenance plans to effectively link supply chain and inventory requirements and reduce freight and logistics costs
- Optimized use and management of rotatable components to cut refurbishment costs
- Maintenance activities can be pre-packaged for rapid action during unplanned turnarounds
- Maintenance innovations (leveraging plant operators for cleaning work, automation of mundane activities, etc.)
