According to Randy Pound, global manufacturing director of maintenance and reliability for Olin Corp., there are two types of maintenance cultures: reactive and proactive.
"Imagine a world where, by getting really good at maintenance and reliability, you can reduce your number of work order notifications by as much as 70 percent," Pound said.
Discussing planning and scheduling of routine maintenance at the Downstream Conference and Exhibition held recently in Galveston, Texas, Pound invited conference delegates to "do the math" and "consider the impact" of reducing work notifications by that high a margin.
"That is something that really can happen as you become predictive and preventive, which is proactive as opposed to reactive," Pound said.
Asset failure is most likely to occur, Pound continued, in the "infant mortality" stage.
"This means they have failed very quickly after you have installed a brand new piece of equipment or after you have done a major intervention on a piece of equipment," he said.
By becoming more predictive and preventive, Pound said Olin has been able to substantially reduce this "infant mortality" rate.
Olin is also becoming much more proactive in its response to maintaining its instrumentation, as well as in its mechanical assets, Pound added.
"Things like instrumentation and electrical equipment, gauges, meters -- usually those things don't wear out. Usually those things get killed by something we have done to them," he explained.
Setting priorities
Pound is so confident in this predictive and preventive approach that "I bet my career on it every day," he said.
"There is no doubt that there's a huge return on investment the more predictive you become."
Sri Mattu, engineering project manager for Suncor Energy, recommended avoiding an "it has to be done yesterday" philosophy.
"You need to find out how to balance that maintenance or breakdown with different resources so the planned schedule is not deviated from," he said. "Prioritization plays a bigger role. When you have some emergency, don't step out from your original plan, because if you start doing that every single day, you're always in the firefight."
Chad Bates, operations and maintenance gatekeeper for BASF, said he agrees with Mattu regarding the importance of prioritization.
"Whenever you put notifications in and convert them to work orders, you have got to have a prioritization system," Bates said, adding that BASF employs a numerical ranking system to prioritize maintenance. "Priority 1's and 2's are what we call schedule-breakers. Priority 1 is 'all hands on deck,' which immediately addresses seal failures, with overtime automatically approved."
A Priority 2 may be addressed within two to three days.
"The backlog is your Priority 3's and 4's," Bates continued. "They are not real pressing issues, but you still need to get them fixed."
Turnaround items that can be addressed when the unit has to be shut down are considered Priority 5's.
"You have got to have some level of authority and accountability around schedule- breakers," added David Reed, director of plant maintenance for Eastman Chemical. "There has to be a process in place where somebody is approving those schedule breakers and they understand the big picture."
"We train and calibrate all of our leaders to recognize that, when you are in maintenance and reliability, your job is not to prevent failures. Your job is to manage risk," Pound concluded. "We bring our production people into that whole philosophy to manage risk. Sometimes that makes you do some smart things that you never had thought of."
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