Have your executives set aggressive targets for improvement?
Do you require a stronger, more consistent reliability process?
Do you need to eliminate unplanned outages due to equipment reliability issues?
Do you need to reduce overall operating costs?
Will you see a significant level of retirement of experienced maintenance and operations personnel within a 5-10 year period?
In order to achieve aggressive performance improvement targets set by corporate leadership, you need to instill a reliability approach throughout the organization. The first step in this effort is to assess your organization and put together a business case. Establish an internal team, trained and coached in the application of reliability practices. Next, you need to ensure that the reliability effort is truly owned by plant personnel –to do this, involve them in the definition of maintenance programs. Participating in work identification activities will also facilitate their reliability education.
Select an initial plant area. Depending on the size and complexity, it will take 3 – 6 months to develop and implement new reliability programs for an area. Detailed definition and documentation of asset maintenance and reliability processes and procedures became vital to ensuring that new personnel are well equipped to support equipment reliability.
While developing new maintenance programs, train the maintenance and operations personnel in the area to perform their new roles within the asset care business process including the management of inspection routes, condition data collection using handheld units, acknowledgement of generated equipment condition alarms and the management of corrective maintenance activities.
Once finished the first area, go on to the next… do not delay implementation and roll out by spending month after month analyzing assets. You can expect to exceed your ROI expectations and sustain the improvement because asset care will become a way of doing business.
For more information on reliability implementation success, go to http://www.ivara.com/index.php/customer-success/case-studies/
