We know from our experience at Ivara that each organization is unique and has priorities and challenges that differ from those faced by others. Some organizations already have an established business process for reliability and have aligned their organization to effectively support it. They simply require a focused implementation to optimize asset condition data management to realize rapid performance improvements. Other organizations have centers of excellence that are not yet cohesively combined into an effective overall asset management system. Many organizations are experiencing significant financial and human resource constraints that limit their ability to take on the full scope of asset performance management implementation initially but are prepared to begin the effort now and build on it as conditions improve.

Flexibility and adaptability are essential to address unique situations. Sometimes a focus on formal work identification practices is required, followed by basic program implementation in EXP while others already have a well-defined maintenance program that simply needs to be automated and implemented within EXP. Some organizations have no formal business process defined and require a focus on organizational alignment in order to successfully transition to a proactive environment. Some have little useful equipment data to start with and therefore are not yet interested in analyzing data. Others have several years of meaningful data and are keenly interested in analyzing data and optimizing reliability and performance.

What is your priority?

A few thoughts on trust, communication, and tools.

First and foremost, cooperation between Maintenance and Operations is built on trust. In order to build trust, start by assigning ownership of assets or asset areas. A collaborative reliability focus requires that Maintenance and Operations owns an asset so that major decisions can be made jointly and there is a real sense of empowerment. Trust can then be earned. Some of our customers have assigned a Maintenance Process Owner and an Operations Process Owner for each major asset.

Secondly, a central asset health dashboard can be the best communication tool they’ve ever had. It can be instrumental in solidifying trust between Operations and Maintenance as well as ensuring optimal performance and reliability. If your program ensures that the health of the asset is being constantly monitored, then Operations understands that releasing equipment to maintenance to perform proactive work or inspections will help eliminate unexpected failure. Operations works with maintenance to determine when maintenance work should be done and that when they release asset they will get it back up and running in a timely fashion.

Lastly, if the majority of the maintenance work is currently unplanned, there will be a major cultural shift necessary for operations and maintenance to cooperate. Senior management must be sold on the benefits of asset performance management, predictive and preventive maintenance. Without top management support, the probability of making any significant progress in changing the culture is very near zero. Providing the proper tools and training to support new proactive processes and practices will to help facilitate a change.

As I visit various industry sites, I look forward to interacting with the shop floor to understand how they feel everything is going. The work ethic is usually very strong and folks ‘get it’. We all need to work smarter, not harder, and strive to improve equipment performance and cost structure.

When commissioning a brand new asset, the focus is very strong on getting it installed, debugged and into production. As we all know, these steps almost always require changes to the design, large and small, obvious and not so obvious. The need for making these changes is understood, but it is critical that all changes become incorporated into their respective equipment documentation records so that a clear history is established as to when and what was done relative to change. With the very complex equipment we’re now using to produce our products, these changes are critical when it comes time to troubleshoot issues and problems, no less train new folks on how the asset operates. Imagine trying to find the source of a problem when the very drawings you’re relying on to help you are out of date. Talk about a blind shot at fixing what’s wrong. Not only does this take much more time away from production due to increased troubleshooting time, but think of the unnecessary aggravation your causing your people as a result of making their jobs that much harder than  need be. 

This issue is found not only around the creation of new assets but is just as common and serious when working on existing equipment. We’re always trying to tweak more out of our existing equipment and this requires changes to be made accordingly. If the appropriate document records are not updated properly, we create a nightmare for the folks trying to care for the equipment. In addition, imagine trying to design the change and not have a clear picture of the current design of the area in which you are working.

As much sense as it makes to keep all of our documents current, it’s been a long time since I visited a site where document maintenance was being practiced. The pain is being self inflicted and only we can resolve this important area of neglect.

Are we really saving any money by not maintaining good equipment document records? I believe we all know the answer.

Go for it and good luck!