Domtar Expanola wins Uptime award for Best Asset Health Management Program

Leaders in the maintenance reliability community met to honor fellow maintenance reliability professionals for their outstanding achievements and to celebrate individual excellence at the Uptime® Magazine Best Maintenance Reliability Program Awards at the International Maintenance Conference held Dec. 5 – 8, 2011.

Ivara customer, Domtar Espanola won Best Asset Health Management Program.

I wanted to highlight one of their leaders, Kim Hunt. Kim spoke in several sessions at the IMC conference and I was so impressed with her passion for establishing a reliability culture. Kim is the Reliability Manager at Domtar’s Pulp and Paper Mill in Espanola, Ontario. She specializes in lubrication, planning, predictive tools, CMMS implementation and the development and implementation of the Ivara EXP condition based asset management program (referred at Domtar as “RDM” – Reliability Driven Maintenance). Kim believes that leadership, commitment, teamwork and persistence are key to Domtar successfully weathering the challenging market conditions.

Congratulations to the team at Domtar.

Link to Uptime Magazine Q&A with the winners… http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/reliabilityweb/uptime_20121201/#/62

Ivara EXP asset health indices, reliability and performance metrics are inputs to CopperLeaf C55 investment projects for maintenance, upgrade, life extension, and replacement. Together, EXP and C55 provide the foundation for fact-based decisions to get the right balance between ongoing maintenance, capital replacement, and overall risk mitigation.

With this solution, utility rate applications become more defensible because they are backed by engineering data; decision-making and planning processes become more transparent and efficient; cycle-time to explore scenarios and generate new plans is reduced; and savings are achieved through optimized maintenance and capital plans.

The EXP / C55 combination sets the standard for complete asset life cycle management.

For more on the Ivara / CopperLeaf partnership, click here.

In this 10 minute interview, Paul Marshall discusses asset performance management as a supply chain strategy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNVjArCajGk&feature=related.

Asset performance improvement initiatives that are based on an increase in asset reliability are an excellent way to maximize financial return from your assets. These initiatives provide significant and sustainable benefits for relatively low financial investments compared to their capital expenditure alternatives.

This white paper describes how to quantify these financial benefits as well as the possible metrics to use in managing the initiative. The paper includes a number of examples where such benefits have been achieved and provides a normalized compilation of results from work performed over the past 10 years.

http://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/reliabilityweb/uptime_20110405/#/48

ScottishPower is not a complacent organization. They were given just two years to address process safety; develop sustainable processes to address the British Government’s Health and Safety Executive HSE Plant Ageing report of 2006 (RR509) and also to attain PAS 55 accreditation. If anyone tells Martin Sedgwick, Head of Asset Management at ScottishPower, that it cannot be done in so little time, that was motivation to get the job done!

It was time to change a very reactive culture in an older coal fired plant to a proactive culture, while at the same time, addressing the future lost knowledge due to employee attrition and the lack of technology to support the approved business model.

In only two years, ScottishPower successfully established the asset management and process safety framework that has led to improved plant reliability. As a result, they have improved performance and transparency of key processes, as well as experienced fewer unplanned outages and breakdowns with significant cost savings:

• 20% reduction in operations and maintenance costs
• 22% increase in plant availability
• 25% reduction in plant forced outage rates
• 10% reduction in insurance premiums

Read the story…

Most organizations today do a poor job of writing out work orders for tasks being done and then providing the needed data after job completion to build a healthy history base. If you think about how long it would take to build a meaningful database, it would take forever to get a solid initiative in place. This is time that most organizations simply do not have.

I believe the key to getting a reliability program underway is to first determine baseline performance data for your most critical equipment that will be key to determining when an asset is starting to function outside of its acceptable boundaries. There are different processes such as Maintenance Task Analysis (MTA)  that allow you to determine this in a very credible way. Once you know what data needs to be looked at, you can then decide how you want this information collected and processed. It can run from simple check sheets done manually or automated using handheld devices all the way up to online data collection and automated condition based monitoring to capture the necessary readings. The trick then becomes how to best analyze, correlate and act on all of this data, often being summarized from of thousands of data points.  If  you are able to look only at the data that falls out of acceptable limits, then it is a lot easier to manage. This is where technology like Ivara EXP comes into the picture.

EXP filters the data and calls your attention to the readings only when necessary and only to those readings that require attention. This in itself is an amazing aid and can save tons of time and resources. With this kind of information being conveyed close to real time to whomever needs to see it, will allow for proactive steps to be taken prior to failure taking place. Hence you have just caught a potential failure prior to it occurring and causing all the time and heartache  that goes along with unplanned downtime. The key to remember is that all of this can be done on your most critical assets in fairly short order. The recorded information that helps you spot and resolve the potential failure also is applied to that historical database (that we started out talking about wanting at the beginning of this posting).

You can and, in fact, should give serious consideration to this approach if you’re looking for timely improvement without taking forever to get started. Improved RELIABILITY can be yours and the gains it brings shared with everyone in the organization in weeks and months, NOT years.

Good luck and enjoy the journey.

The trick continues to be getting senior management to understand what reliability is and what it can do for bottom line corporate performance. Since it’s not easy to get the ear of senior folks much of the time, there is another way to consider going about this…

If you can identlfy an asset or process in your area of responsibility that fails a lot and matters a lot when it fails, that might be a great place to try a pilot. If it is truely a problem area, and given you and the team you work with can make a significant difference in how it’s performing, it’s got to receive serious attention. Once you’ve achieved that, the natural question asked is “what made such a difference”? There lies your opportunity to show how your team made this happen. The fact that it was a team effort, proven successful and not too hard to accomplish has got to start getting the attention of others in your organization. What better way to get a program to take hold then to show success and value for all to see. 

Give it a try, it just might make a ‘big’ difference.

It’s all about teamwork. Reliability simply can’t be improved unless all parties understand the goals and work together to help make it happen.

In my opinion, this starts with leadership from both operations and maintenance being brought together to redefine what the needs of the site are as they relate to future health and success. Once there is agreement on these goals, then they have to lead by example which means ‘show by example’ to the rest of the organization. Jointly convey the agreed to goals to everyone at the site and explain why it’s so very important for everyone to join forces to drive improvement. It should also be made clear that it’s part of everyone’s job to help make this happen. By jointly working on improvement projects impacting asset performance and health, the climate will only get better and the culture stronger in helping form lasting improvements.

 Good luck with this vital initiative.

The key to this question focuses on our ability to create a culture change that will motivate everyone to embrace reliability improvement and keep it going even when we’ve changed positions.

So many of the companies I’ve been visiting are really struggling with how to accomplish this vital part (culture change0 that is needed for true success. This difficulty is created by those who don’t understand the importance of everyone in the organization learning about why reliability is important to both them and their companies. This learning has to be related to the ‘what’s in it for me’ and why is that important. In addition, we must do a better job of getting as many people involved as possible in helping define the needed changes and then being a part of making them happen. Now you start to see significant ownership develop and the program is no longer yours or mine but ours.

I believe that it’s possible to sustain equipment reliability in any organization with any group of people once you get your mind around how critical this element of your program truly is in order to establish success. That done, when one of us leaves the organization, no matter what our role, the rest of the folks will insure this effort continues. Good luck as you think your way through this process as it relates to your efforts and enjoy the benefits that will be achieved by all.

If we wait too long to perform corrective work, repair costs will be higher because substantial secondary damage will occur. This damage can cause problems in other areas such as productivity, quality, safety and environment.

To avoid these costly scenarios, we need to understand what the actual state our equipment is in and provide the appropriate maintenance at the right time.
Inspection results are often vague and subjective because they tend not to accurately specify the severity of equipment condition.

Once we have enough data about equipment that we have inspected using these severity states, we can track and trend equipment performance. This will provide the information we need to perform the right corrective work at the right time.

Next week: Visit our blog to read tips on defining failure and consistency!