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
