On April 19th visit the PAS 55 Conference for a bonus activity!

Learn how Scottish Power ingrained a sustainable process for asset management. Bill Fulton was the OMS Project Lead at ScottishPower Energy Wholesale, the second company in the world to achieve PAS 55 compliance to the updated standard. Bill will outline the framework for ScottishPower’s Operations and Maintenance and Operations Strategy (OMS), including a new risk based approach to asset management. He will discuss the timing and critical success factors in how they became PAS 55 compliant. Understand  the key elements required before you define your AM strategy, tips on how to develop and implement an AM Strategy, how to identify, appraise and prioritize options and develop effective AM plans.

Attend this session to ensure that your organization knows and manages risk effectively and that how to review and improve performance over time. Learn how to define asset information, guide how it is gathered and analyzed, how it is interpreted and how generally managed. Finally understand the key steps in how ScottishPower developed their organization for a sustainable AM culture.   

Check out last weeks post for all the details on Reliability 2.0

Or click HERE

Fundamentals of RCM using RCM2 Methodology

An Introduction to RCM instructed by Ivara and members of The Aladon Network
April 20, 8-11:30 am
Includes copy of the book RCM2 by John Moubray

The application of RCM2 completely transforms the view that any organization has of its physical assets. Understanding RCM2 will revolutionize your view of maintenance and how maintenance and operations work together to care for assets.

In a half-day workshop, you will learn how RCM2 works (at a high level); learn the language and, more importantly, come to terms with the paradigm shift embodied in the RCM2 philosophy.

You will:
• Learn how to establish an overall reliability strategy with a clear understanding of the consequences and risks associated with your equipment.
• Learn how to develop technically valid equipment maintenance programs using the RCM2 methodology.
• Gain an understanding of the key differences in the RCM2 methodology as compared to other methods.
• Objectively determine which of your assets require RCM2 and which are suitable for complementary methodologies. Use a tailorable, risk-based approach to assess factors and determine how to balance RCM with parallel strategies depending on the asset’s business context and need.

RCM has been used to help formulate physical asset management strategies in almost every area of industry, in almost every industrialized country in the world. John Moubray, the founder of RCM2, and other leaders in the field worked with SAE standards body to develop a recognized standard for RCM called JA1011 and now updated to JA1012. RCM2 complies with this standard.  Don’t miss this session as it could be your company’s next business strategy to greater profitability, to comply with industry regulations, to ensure safety and environmental integrity and to reshape your organization.

Are you attending? We hope to see you there.

Reliability 2.0 Conference- April 20-22, 2010

Hyatt Regency Bonaventure Conference Center and Spa
Fort Lauderdale Florida, USA

For more information click HERE

Result from week;  great to see a customer get real value and quick results using our tools; we have generated lots of interest from the locations outside North America;  now working to put a plan together to engage the rest of North America and other locations around the world. 

Sometimes a one week analysis is worth a thousand words.

However, studies have shown that the majority of failures are not age related.
In the new definition of failure, all equipment entering service immediately starts to wear, whether installed as new or brought back to new through repair. Equipment will eventually reach a point where it fails to meet the operating requirement. This failure point is not necessarily predictable – it could happen early on or after years of use.

If the equipment has no capability at all, it is in a totally failed state or breakdown state. If there is some capability, but the equipment is not meeting the desired level of performance, it is said to be in a functionally failed or partially failed state.
By conducting inspections of equipment condition on a regular basis, you can track early signs or indicators of a partial or functional failure long before it breaks down. By finding indicators of failure, maintenance can be targeted more accurately. When you look for indicators of failure, this is called conducting a condition inspection.

Let’s use an example. We have a pump that is required to supply between 130 and 100 gallons of water to the process. If it supplies any less than 100 gallons, the process will not operate properly. In the past, we defined failure as the point when the pump broke and does not pump any water at all. But most failures do not occur instantly. To track potential failures, we use indicators (such as tolerances, or gauge readings or other visual physical signs that indicate equipment condition is deteriorating). Since the failure point is not necessarily related to age, indicators must be monitored on a regular basis. Let’s use a gauge reading as our indicator. The indicator reads that the pump is only pumping 105 gallons. Since this is the low end of what it is required to do, it is considered a potential failure or point P on the curve. If the deterioration is not corrected, it will continue until it is pumping less than 100 gallons of water. The pump is still working, but not at the desired performance level – it has a functional failure. This is today’s definition of failure, the point where the asset fails to perform its intended function.

The amount of time that elapses between the detection of a potential failure and its deterioration to functional failure is known as the PF interval. If you properly define inspection tasks, you are able to detect failure long before it occurs and perform the corrective maintenance work when it will least impact operations.

Remember that if the potential failure (P) is not detected, the equipment will continue to deteriorate until the point where it reaches functional failure (F). Once enough condition inspection data has been defined, you can calculate the PF Interval and plan maintenance activities.

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!

http://reliabilityweb.com/index.php/articles/things_to_think_about_and_do_in_2010/

It’s no different than our automobiles. The mechanics can work their hearts out to have our cars in peak condition but then we have to do our part and work with them in learning how to care for our auto if we want that condition to sustain itself. This includes tasks we can help with such as checking the fluid levels, tire air pressure how we drive it,  etc. 

It’s all about us working together. We collectively need to have all our personnel understand how the equipment is supposed to function, all the many ways that it can fail, and their respective roles to keep the failures from occurring. There are incredibly straight forward processes that can be used to help this happen. Maintenance Task Analysis (MTA) and Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) are two that come to mind. They are designed to help bring together all those that we want to care for and operate our assets and get at the root of how to optimize equipment performance. By now most folks have heard of these approaches to improving performance but how many have really gotten into ‘making it happen’. The value to both the shop floor and the company itself are unbelievable.

If you happen to be one of those that hasn’t taken this type opportunity to the next level, please give it some serious consideration. The success that you’ll enjoy just might be your own.

 Enjoy the journey and good luck.

How you Define your Inspection Program can mean the Difference Between Success and Failure

Poor performing assets result in lost production, poor product quality, late deliveries, accidents, incidents, and even major catastrophes. We need to balance risk and cost. On average, a capital-intensive manufacturing facility will identify 200 or more modes per one million dollars in assets. If we don’t know what those failure modes are, or the likelihood of them occurring, then we are turning a blind eye on the risk they pose to your organization.

To start, we need to regularly inspect and monitor trends in the condition of our assets. But how we record inspections and respond to failure modes can have a huge impact on financial results.

Make it Easier for your Inspectors and Reap the Benefits in Asset Performance

Inspection results are often vague and subjective because they tend not to accurately specify the severity of equipment condition. When results are open to interpretation like OK/Normal or Not OK/Abnormal, maintenance plans cannot be optimized. This may lead to maintenance being performed too early or too late, causing more costly maintenance than necessary. We need to be more specific in how we define inspections to ensure accurate and consistent recording of equipment condition.

Make it easy for any inspector by predefining condition severities that can be selected when doing the inspection. This leaves the guesswork out of it. Ivara EXP Enterprise is a tool that allows us to set predefined severity states for each piece of equipment. By using these predefined states during an inspection, we can identify the equipment’s actual state and compare its performance against its normal 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.

To find out more about how Ivara EXP can help you make condition inspections easy, come back to our blog next month to read the next Ivara tip!

It seems that the plants leadership has worked over the past 2 years to put in place a complete PM program for all of its process control equipment. To their credit, they did a good job of identifying key assets and drafting an outline of what needed to be done and how frequently they should do it but that’s where the effort came to a stop.

Though they took a good first pass at the mentioned program, they failed to involve shop floor personnel in defining key equipment and leveraging their experience and knowledge to define what needed to be done and how often the PM should be scheduled. As you might guess, this caused a credibility gap when the program was rolled out, one which they never really recovered from.

The next shortcoming was the lack of using a formal process to get at the root of what needed to be looked at based on cost to do and consequences of failure. This allowed a number of PM’s to be put in place that really were a waste of time and dollars due to the very limited payback that could be expected vs the outlay of resources to accomplish the work. This is where a structured approach such as Maintenance Task Analysis (MTA), or for key critical assets, the use of Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) would be a tremendous help in insuring the right work would be done at the right time.

Another shortfall to the approach that was taken was the lack of understanding for what Predictive Maintenance (PdM) concepts could do for them relative to seeing problems starting to develop prior to their becoming an issue. Time based maintenance is just to hit and miss for the majority of failures we try to catch when attempting to improve equipment reliability and performance. This is backed by documented findings that over 80% of all failure is random in nature.

Another shortfall that I would like to touch on is the importance of documenting the findings while performing a PM. Actually this needs to be done for all work, including the Reactive Maintenance carried out each day. This documented data allows you to understand exactly what and where your failures are occurring. This information really becomes the key to improving future performance. The data needs to be captured, documented and trended so as to be of the most value in sorting out what you want to focus on to drive improvement.

The company I’m relating to didn’t understand how critical these steps were and thus really evolved to what I call the ‘Poke and Hope’ approach to driving improvement.

As you think about the short comings listed here, I would encourage you to consider how your respective programs were developed and how well they are serving your needs. Does any of this sound like what might be taking place within your organization? I believe you’ll agree that this true story could be happening to you. Good Luck!

by Joe Marin, Implementation Consultant, Ivara Corporation

The old saying that goes “What gets measured gets done” is only partly correct.

Many organizations find that despite a seaming wealth of Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s), little gain can be seen in the bottom-line of the corporation or at least tied defensibly with the initial project investment to achieve those gains. How then is a widely accepted process management tool failing to provide what it is meant to?

The answer is that performance management is not a simple process. Sure, over the long-term, well established processes and performance measures require minimal effort to maintain when compared with managing out-of-control processes, but to get from the out-of-control process to the “well-oiled” version takes a concerted and well reasoned effort. Key performance indicators can help in this regard but care must be taken in their application. This is meant as an introduction to many of the aspects to consider when establishing and using key performance indicators to measure improvement.

DETERMINE BUSINESS NEED
First determine what is important to the business, make sure that the indicator is linked to the business’ objectives (ie, Safety, Environmental compliance, Cost effectiveness, Quality, etc). There are dozens of potential business objectives, select only the most important to start with, those that are clearly defined as company policy are obvious choices. This is in keeping with the Six Sigma philosophy of focusing the measures on what is Critical to Satisfaction (CTS) of the customer.

DETERMINE THE AREA OF FOCUS AND LIMIT SCOPE
Walk the process and determine which areas show opportunity for improvement. List the processes and sub-processes in order of the size of opportunity and potential impact to the business objectives. Select one to three of the sub-processes for improvement. Note that, the more processes you try to affect change on at the same time, the harder it is to determine which changes you made to the process are responsible for the changes measured with the KPI’s.

Limit the amount of business objectives you intend to measure the impact on to one or two. Over time, the amount of measures will grow and cover all business objectives eventually, however, it is important to always watch your scope. It is a common failing to establish a large amount of performance measures all at the same time; this shot-gun approach overwhelms those who monitor and take action, and greatly reduces the chances that the implementation will be successful.

4-I’S – INDICATORS INEFFECTIVE IN ISOLATION
A single indicator will only tell part of the story. An indicator can only tell you what the output of the process it is measuring is. Only by comparing the indicator with other related measures can the problem be refined. For instance, Schedule Compliance = 40%, what does this tell us as a business? It tells us that we have an issue with schedule compliance, but it does not say why there is a problem or where the source is. Combine this with Estimate Accuracy = 90%, Maintenance Labour Utilization = 115% and %Reactive Work = 75%, and we can more closely theorize the root cause of the problem. Just looking at the Scheduling Compliance measure, the business can often be mistaken in its interpretation of the measure and assume that because the problem appears to be with scheduling, the solution also lies within scheduling. Whereas, when we look at the related data, Estimate accuracy, Maintenance Labour Utilization and % Reactive Work, it appears more likely that a large amount of reactive work likely forced the maintenance group to break the schedule.

KPIS SHOULD BE DESIGNED AND TESTED
Indicators generally return numeric values, which leads to the assumption that the results are irrefutable, scientific and that the conclusions based on the results are objective and not subjective. Most indicators can be interpreted subjectively. In order to aid the results to be as objective as possible, a KPI set should be formulated carefully by experienced personnel working together; this group should theorize likely reasons that a KPI can return a positive or negative value or trend and document this to aid those interpreting the data. Each theory should be tested with positive and negative inputs of the actual object/sub-process being measured prior to implementing the KPIs.
Do not just establish KPIs that measure areas thought to be performing poorly. Although we want to focus on making improvements, it is important to maintain what is already performing well.

It is often a good idea to include personnel that are well educated in Six Sigma methodology to aid in the development of KPIs, as they are knowledgeable in scientific measures and can link KPI sets to the Critical to Satisfaction measures of the business objectives.

LEADING VS LAGGING INDICATORS
Leading indicators are those that are used to predict early changes in performance and are direct measurements of a specific step in a process (hence the term leading, they lead you to the specific source of the measurement before the cycle is complete). Used effectively, leading indicators can be used to mitigate specific problems within a process before the business is impacted negatively.

Lagging indicators are those that show trends or the effects of changes to a set of steps within a process (hence the term lagging, they measure the results of a process after the cycle is complete). Lagging indicators are good gauges of cultural or systemic problems within a process. Used effectively, lagging indicators can be used to show the results of changes made to specific actions taken to improve the process.

If you’re trying to making improvements to a process, use leading indicators to determine those areas you will want to make specific improvements to then use lagging indicators to show the results of the changes made and how they affect the larger (parent) process. Leading and lagging indicators should be used in concert with each other, not in isolation.

IMPLEMENT IN STAGES
When implementing KPI’s, ensure that they are implemented in stages. There are two main reasons for this. The first reason, as mentioned previously, is to not overwhelm those monitoring and acting on the indicators. This can lead to sustainability issues with the measures and missed opportunities for improvement. The second reason is to allow time for the KPI’s to be tested and refined. When first starting to develop performance indicators it is common to have minor issues with the data inputs and calculations that lead to inaccurate measures. Having too many indicators often buries these flaws and often leads to wasted effort. This sows the seeds of doubt in the reliability of all key performance indicators and threatens the sustainability of the program.

In keeping with the 4-I’s, key performance indicators should be implemented in related sets (modules) in these implementation stages.

ESTABLISH THE BUSINESS TIERS IN THE REPORTING STRUCTURE
Indicators should role up the business tiers from the front-line managers to upper management. That way, upper management can determine if the performance issues are systemic or local.

SET APPROPRIATE SAMPLING FREQUENCY AND TREND WINDOW
Because most key performance indicators are used to aid in determining process effectiveness, the indicators must have time to build effective trends in order to determine if the process being measured is improving, maintaining or degrading. Ensure that you determine an effective sampling frequency and trend window for each individual indicator. Do not use the performance results to take action or report gains based on only one or two readings, always allow the indicator to develop a firm trend, highlight any outliers in the data and record the reasons for each outlier as this helps to defend the data’s integrity.

UNDERSTAND HUMAN FACTORS
Always be aware of the human factors involved when establishing KPI’s. Workers can often feel threatened that their own performance is what is being measured and can find ways of manipulating the process or measure to ensure a favourable measure results. Once a measure is compromised it can take a fair amount of effort to restore it of develop a new measure to take its place. So how do we deal with the human factors?

1. Educate all personnel in the reporting chain of the purpose and philosophy of the KPI.
2. Do not use a KPI as a personal performance measure or blame tool. KPI’s measure a process’s effectiveness and are not intended to measure the poor performance of a worker. There may be reasons that a worker’s performance will affect a process negatively, i.e. lack of training, oversight, etc. The moment that a KPI is used to directly reward or punish a worker, the KPI will likely be compromised to ensure that only a favourable output is returned in the future.
3. When establishing a KPI set, do not focus on solely the negatives. Processes that are working need to be reinforced, therefore processes that show upward trends consistently need to well publicized, but also, processes that are maintaining themselves at or above targets need to be promoted because these processes are being effectively executed by personnel and providing good value to the business.
4. KPIs should be automated and require as little direct effort to input values whenever possible. This not only helps the KPI to be sustainable, it has the added value of better protecting the integrity of the data and does not have the negative stigma of being an onerous chore for those inputting data.

IN THE END
Like all new tools, KPIs can be very useful in helping a business to achieve and maintain improved performance but, like all new tools, adequate time, development, learning and careful use is needed to ensure they produce what is intended of them.