Maintain to sustain19 January 2014

As managers wrestle with ageing workforces, skills shortages and a perception of maintenance as non-core, Brian Tinham looks at how to change all that and get more and better out of technicians, factories and plants

There's nothing wrong with RCM (reliability centred maintenance). For that matter, there's nothing wrong with TPM (total productive maintenance), autonomous maintenance or most of the methodologies that seek to formalise maintenance around optimising efficiency and uptime. The issue, however, is that most don't go quite far enough, because problems concerning plant reliability, productivity etc are rarely, if ever, only due to maintenance.

Splitting hairs? Well no: Focusing on maintenance almost to the exclusion of all else may have served us well in the past – it helped to redefine the value of technicians and defined what good looks like. But such approaches are bound to be fundamentally limited. And, according to senior practitioners like Andrew Fraser, managing director of Reliable Manufacturing and Derek Hill, managing director of Advanced Technology Services (both mechanical engineers), that's why so many well-intentioned projects eventually stall.

For Fraser, RCM needs to step up a significant gear to become 'reliability centred business' if companies want sustainable improvement. But, either way, both agree that, by adopting a more holistic and intelligent approach to asset management, not only can maintenance processes be better optimised and plant be made more productive, but also today's big issues surrounding skills shortages and ageing engineers can be eased. How? Because fewer breakdowns mean less work and more time for the clever stuff that motivates and retains good technicians.

Put reliability at the top of the agenda
"It is a mistake to think reliability revolves around maintenance: You have to start by getting the processes right and eliminating existing defects," explains Fraser. "I saw that in my later years, working with ICI around the world: The better [business units] had made the transition to worrying about reliability, not just maintenance. By putting reliability at the top of the agenda, fewer things go wrong so organisations reduce the need for reactive maintenance."

They also create a safer working environment. According to research by ExxonMobil, maintenance staff are five times more likely to get injured during a reactive task than a planned one. "The fewer interruptions for reactive maintenance, the lower the injury rate," insists Fraser. "A reliable plant is a safe plant is a cost-efficient plant. The benefits are huge: Increased asset utilisation and production capability... and ultimately, revenue growth." He cites one unnamed UK petrochemical plant that, following an intensive reliability programme, "achieved its best performance in 50 years and is now on track to deliver profitability gains of more than £10 million per annum".

Advanced Technology Services' Hill agrees, adding that smart or lean maintenance should also be about "aligning maintenance to business goals" – which for most boils down to improving OEE (overall equipment effectiveness) at machine, line and plant levels. His company, which provides full production maintenance services to Caterpillar's and Eaton's factories, seeks to effect that improvement by elevating the maintenance role from repair technicians to "asset productivity engineers".

So much for the theory, what about practice? Fraser concedes it's not easy. "It's as much about leadership and culture as it is about procedures. Every organisation has a culture that has been successful in the past, so management need to be convinced of the value of changing it to drive and support improved plant reliability."

So that's the first hurdle and Fraser says best results come from starting with reliability and operational excellence education at the senior levels. After that, it's about agreeing overarching plans to root out and deliver changes, recognising that everyone influences reliability in different ways. "There are certain things that only executives can do; others that operators can do; and others again that only maintenance engineers can do. So, people need to get away from the old blame culture and move to cross-functional co-operation."

But then it's into the nitty gritty, with an interesting twist on making change happen. It's what Fraser calls "a parallel top-down, bottom-up approach", meaning that management champions projects, but people at the front line drive them – partly because that encourages ownership and, partly, they know what's not working. It's up to the team to determine priorities based on bigger-picture value, cost and difficulty, he says. That's critical to exposing big issues hidden in the "thousands of small things that are not as they should be, tend to be tolerated, but sometimes come together to cause major problems".

Hill takes a different approach – essentially empowering and supporting his experienced maintenance teams. "We do that by providing our technicians with the tools, processes and infrastructure to do the job better," he states. "That includes issuing mobile tablets, so they can see historical data, check parts availability, look for root causes and be more productive, without moving from the job." He reckons this technology saves about one hour per shift per technician, and he says they also get call centre support, up to and including video conferencing with machine-specific experts.

But there's another important aspect to making this work. "We talk about metrics-driven maintenance, so quality of data is essential. That means properly logging work order descriptions, cause codes, rectification codes etc, so that risks can be quantified and maintenance targeted – but also to help support capital decisions." And Hill also observes that good data further helps with any "clash of objectives between maintenance and production", revealing the impact of proposals with hard evidence.

Losing £1 million potential profit
What might you reasonably expect from a rethink? Fraser gives the example of one client's downstream process plant: "We got their maintenance technicians, operators and supervisors in a room to talk about problems. One was a lack of consistent supply from the upstream feeder plant. It turned out that, although the latter would phone to request reduced production rates while they dealt with plant problems, they didn't communicate when those were resolved. That one oversight meant the plant was losing £1 million potential profit, yet senior engineers and managers knew nothing about it, because they were focused on big breakdowns."

Both Fraser's and Hill's approaches would find those kinds of hidden problems. The issue is giving maintenance the professional standing it deserves, the training, tools and support it needs – and then seeing tasks in the context of continuous, plant-wide improvement.

TPM and RCM
The perfect storm for maintenance engineering is an ageing workforce, a skills shortage and youngsters who don't see maintenance as a rewarding career. That fairly accurately describes the situation UK industry finds itself in – and current initiatives with apprenticeships aren't likely to change it anytime soon. Hence the appeal of TPM (total productive maintenance) and RCM (reliability centred maintenance) – both of which enable staff to do more with less, while also improving OEE (overall equipment effectiveness).
Peter Gagg, managing director of MCP Consulting and Training, certainly believes so. He makes the point that TPM – which involves training and empowering operators on simple asset care and maybe operational improvement – leads to fewer problems, better plant uptime and, hence, reduced demands on maintenance. He concedes that some firms find it easier than others, but insists that smartening up maintenance in this way not only leads to better efficiency and productivity, but also enriches technicians' and operators' careers.
"It's much the same with RCM," he adds. "You look at your operators and technicians, but then you also review maintenance activities, assessing their value in terms of risk of failure to the line or plant." Then the goal is optimising the maintenance workload by cancelling superfluous tasks and focusing instead on those proven to matter most, and also investing in predictive maintenance and condition monitoring tools where necessary. "That analysis will probably reduce the overall workload by 20 to 30%."

Brian Tinham

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