Located on the edge of Lake Ontario just east of downtown Toronto, PEM’s 2011 Maintenance Award winner is Pickering Nuclear — one of the world's largest nuclear generating facilities, right here in Canada. The massive plant has six operating CANDU (Canadian Deuterium Uranium) reactors, and all together, the station has a total output of 3,100 megawatts.

There are people here 24 hours a day, 365 days a year,” explains Jim Whyte, director of work management at Pickering Nuclear. “I find the ebb and flow of people in and out of here to be amazing.”

It takes quite a large, talented team to keep a facility of such size operational. He says there are more than 900 employees in maintenance alone and another 600 in operations at the Pickering site.

Additionally, it takes a large numbers of jobs and a schedule to keep everything running as it should. “We schedule about 2,500 maintenance tasks per week for our online schedule,” Whyte continues. “And during outages, we have a task rate of somewhere between 200 and 250 tasks per day on the shutdown unit. 

“Keeping all that scheduled … and making sure work is ready is a full-time job for people on the site.”

Ken Sutton is the manager of work control at this location. His department, working with all other departments, coordinates timely identification, screening, scoping, planning, scheduling and execution of all work necessary to maximize the availability and reliability of the station equipment and systems. It’s a big responsibility, and the company tracks its completion rates in order to grow and improve from week to week.

“We measure this every week and we have trend graphs and 13-week rolling averages,” he says. “And after every week we have what’s called a T+1 meeting where the whole group sits down with our metrics and talks about and learns from the issues of the previous week.” From that point, they take actions and make corrections.

It’s time well spent. This site’s reliability will be even more critical for the next eight years as Ontario undergoes a nuclear power makeover.

A Critical Juncture
Nuclear represents nearly 50 percent of OPG’s total production and over half of Ontario’s electricity generation. In 2011, the Ontario government began to implement its Long-Term Energy Plan, recognizing the need to build new nuclear units at the Darlington site, to undergo the mid-life refurbishment of the units at the Darlington station and to invest in the continued operation of Pickering — until 2020.

Summer 2011 marked 40 years of generation for Pickering, and due to its age, it is now operating toward an end of life that’s planned for around 2020. Complicating matters, before Pickering is taken off line for good, its power will be needed to keep the province flush with electricity as the 22-year-old four-unit Darlington station undergoes a unit-by-unit refurbishment process starting in 2016.

In a speech, Tom Mitchell, president and CEO of Ontario Power Generation, said, “All eyes will be on us to make sure we get it right.”

In February 2010, Ontario Power generation (OPG) announced it would proceed with the planning for the refurbishment of the Darlington station. The decision came after the positive outcomes of initial studies on the plant’s condition and continued strong safety and operating performance. Post-refurbishment, the station would operate for an additional 25 to 30 years. OPG’s success depends on all its departments working together. As a corporate mission, OPG says all its power sources must demonstrate strong project management expertise by delivering outages and projects safely, on time and on budget.

One of the people seeing Pickering through this transition process is Whyte, who has been working at this facility on and off for around 30 years. “Pickering is preparing to make up lost power … by ensuring that the six units we have operating are operating as reliably as possible. We have a target forced-loss rate — which is the period of time when we’re not available — of less than five percent by 2015. And we plan to achieve that production rate by investing in the plant, ensuring that our preventive maintenance work gets done, that our outages are executed on time with the scope that we intend, and that we complete maintenance on major plant components.”

Teamwork
Tammy Mullins, a maintenance specialist, says having all departments — operations, engineering and maintenance — working as a team is necessary to do the job right. “We all need everybody’s support to complete all the tasks, whether it’s a scaffold, whether is insulation removal, whether it’s engineering support,” she says. “We’re very strong team players here, and it shows in the pride we show our plant and in our equipment,” she adds.

In order to get all potential issue or concerns on the table, they hold work control meetings. “We look at the plan for parts holds, we look at the plan for system configuration and we make sure it’s sequenced and scheduled properly,” and they go through every task, work together, bring issues forward and get them settled in the room. It can mean deferring work, changing work or cutting work for other purposes.

For an example of facilitating communication between departments, technical engineer/officer Heather Au — the facility’s engineering preventative maintenance single point of contact — acts as a facilitator between the maintenance, operations and work-control organizations and engineering.
Daily, she interfaces with work control to ensure the preventive maintenance program is being executed as planned. “There are hiccups along the way, and that’s where I come in, interfacing with maintenance and engineering services, to see what we can do to get the work done.”

Being able to problem-solve issues between departments demonstrates teamwork, and Mullins recounts once success story when they had an issue changing the lights over a pool where all the fuel from the reactor building is stored.

“What my group had to do was to build a scaffold on top of the crane in order to get to the lights,” she explains. “There was an issue with the scaffold because the engineers needed the scaffold to approve the tie-off points (and they couldn’t go up there without a scaffold), and we couldn’t build the scaffold because we needed the tie-off points.” The groups had several “challenge” meetings and finally came up with a path forward, so the job was done safely, on time and the lights were replaced.

“That was an example of engineering and maintenance working together, working through challenges to get work done.”

Safety is Paramount
Donning earplugs, safety glasses, protective shoes and hard hats, we toured one of the incredibly impressive and noisy turbine buildings. The massive structure, which is approximately 382 metres long, 54 metres wide and 45 metres high, contained four turbine generators, each with a single shaft rotating at 1,800 rpm. Unable to approach the operating turbine for safety reasons, we stood beside one of the turbine replacement blades. Next to this imposing, spiraling helix of metal, we were dwarfed in comparison — and it dawned on me that this is no any ordinary plant.

Safety was the key consideration that guided the design and construction of the station. The CANDU system includes several ways to safely shut down reactors, and in the unlikely event of a serious incident, the multiple barrier safety system will prevent any harmful release of radiation.

At Pickering, safety and reliability aren’t separate — they are related. All the operations staff, Whyte says, understands that maintenance is directly equated to reliability and reliability is directly equated to safety. “Safe production is our thing. We won’t run if it’s not safe. And if there’s any question about it whatsoever, we shut the units down.

“The key to avoiding that situation,” he stresses, “is maintenance.”

Au reiterates the importance of this mindset, explaining that safety is truly their No. 1 priority — and that includes employee, plant and public safety.
“Employees are fully trained and qualified for their roles and responsibilities,” she says. “On a day-to-day basis, all jobs — big and small — begin with a pre-job brief to discuss potential hazards on the job-site, to discuss error-likely situations, to familiarize with the task at hand, to discuss expected results and back-out conditions, and to review any questions, issues, or previous experience with similar work.

“Bottom line: safety is never compromised in anything we do because we don’t want employees getting injured.”

Whyte adds that they assign “criticality codes” for their equipment. They are coded one through four in terms of their importance to production or safety. Code 1 and Code 2 work is treated with the highest respect: “We don’t delay the preventative maintenance, we execute the work on time and we put a lot of effort and energy into making sure the work is ready to go.”

So for now, OPG will plan for the continued operation of the Pickering station over the next decade to ensure electricity needs are met during the Darlington refurbishment. In the mean time, the province’s citizens have one large maintenance team to thank for helping keep everything running smoothly. Because a lot depends on them.

“We’re very proud of where we work,” Sutton says. “We work hard. And to be recognized, that means something to us. We’re proud to show our facility off.”

The hard fact of running any facility is that no equipment lasts forever. No matter the make, model, degree of use, or quality of maintenance, every thing eventually reaches the end of its useful lifecycle. This can end in costly repairs or full-out replacements. How a facility manages this transition differs from industry to industry, but for those in the financially constrained healthcare industry, an extra effort must be made to find solutions with financial, environmental and energy efficiency benefits.

This was the challenge for British Columbia’s Kootenay Lake Hospital, when its management was faced with deciding the fate of its failing 57 and 58 Cleaver-Books boilers, which had served the facility well for more than 40 years.

“Those boilers were old, they were getting to their lifecycle end,” Kootenay Lake Hospital’s chief engineer Mario Campese recalls, “The lifecycle of a boiler is such that when you’re starting to push 40 years, you really should be looking at replacement as opposed to constant repair. In our case, we had to decide whether to retube the boilers or replace them, and in the end we decided it was time for a replacement due to cost of repair and maintenance.”

The decision to replace its Cleaver-Brooks boilers opened the hospital to a number of options. To ensure their dollars would be spent in the most effective way possible, management employed the help of a mechanical engineering consultant firm, Cobalt Engineering, which assisted in selecting three pairs of smaller, more efficient boilers, which would be allocated to different parts of the facility.

“In replacing those two boilers, they went to six in total smaller boilers, but each pair of boilers had discreet duties,” Campese says. “As a result, we had two for domestic hot water use, two for heating the building, and two Clayton steam boilers for process steam required in our laundry, [operating room], sterilizing department, and kitchen and laboratories.”

The addition of the six new boilers brought many benefits to the facility. A prime example of this was the installation of two, monotube Clayton boilers to handle the facility’s steam operations. They feature faster heat up times, quicker response to load change, enhanced safety and a design that diminished heat and chemical loss. The boilers represented a marked improvement from their predecessors. What’s more, an independent study by the San Diego University, reported that the Clayton Steam Generator averaged 5.8-percent higher efficiency across the entire operating range than the Cleaver-Brooks firetube boiler — another key motivator behind Kootenay Lake Hospital’s purchase.

“They wanted the best efficiency on the market which was the benefit of a Clayton,” notes Dave Stalker of Pacific Boiler, the Clayton distributor that worked with the hospital. “They could put two smaller units in that would take less physical footprint and give them more area in their boiler room. So it came down to efficiency and significant space saving.”

Overall, Stalker adds, “Clayton produce more steam for less fuel than the existing steam boilers. When I say high efficiency I mean substantial fuel savings.”

 Considering its remote location in Nelson, B.C., Kootenay Lake Hospital’s engineers were accustomed to learning the ins and outs of every piece of equipment that entered the facility, lessening their reliance on outside service calls. With Pacific Boiler situated nearly ten hours away, the same in-house training was required with the new boilers, and Pacific Boiler was more than willing to accommodate the hospital’s needs.

“Most companies don’t want to be trained, they just want to be able to call the service department. But because they’re remote, and because they are a hospital, it was important to them that they could do just about anything they needed to do on the boiler to get it going,” Stalker says. “There’s some things that legally they can’t do, such as some gas projects because they’re not gas fitters, but in regards to the general maintenance and the service, their own staff can perform and they do it quite well.”

Looking back at the initial training, Campese adds: “Dave Stalker did the first service on the boilers and we participated and got instruction from him concerning the peculiarities of that boiler. From that first time, we took it on and kept going from there. It’s been all good.”

During the time since the replacement of its boilers, and Kootenay Lake Hospital team has had ample time to assess how much its boiler replacements have saved them in terms of money and energy. Looking back throughout the decade, Campese says: “In the eleven years since then, the hospital has continued to see the benefits of these on-going energy and maintenance savings.”

Conclusion: It can be costly to replace systems, but it’s a price all facilities must eventually pay. Finding the best replacement, and the right partners for the job is therefore key in repeating Kootenay Lake Hospital’s success.

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Glenn Adgey is the general manager of Clayton Sales & Service Ltd. For more information, visit www.claytonindustries.com.

Organizations around the world face many types of challenges. The current tumultuous economic scenario, coupled with an ever-intensifying competition in the global market, has placed them under constant pressure to enhance business and operational efficiencies, reduce spending, increase profitability and optimize their maintenance, repair and operation (MRO) supply chain to drive bottom-line savings.

MRO tools are at the heart of the indirect supply chain and play an important role in the production lifecycle. MRO supply chain, thus, presents one of the most valuable opportunities for cost reduction, cost avoidance and improved productivity. Many companies in the past have focused their cost-reducing efforts on direct materials and capital spending rather than MRO supplies, which have been traditionally seen as value with little potential for savings. But manufacturers are starting to take a hard look at their MRO supply chain.

With manufacturing facilities spread across multiple locations, companies find it difficult to control their MRO spend without a standard framework in place. Lack of visibility into the inventory hinders asset utilization, prevents efficient use of resources, creates excessive costs and expenses for equipment repair and replacement, leads to low productivity and gives rise to bloated inventories. Lack of visibility into the supplier base gives rise to maverick spending and inefficient sourcing and procurement strategies, thus leading to lost savings opportunities. The list goes on — but all these challenges, when traced back to their points of origin reveal one single root cause: bad master data.

The challenges with master data arise from the structure of the organization itself. Organizations today have been built around a number of mergers and acquisitions, with several ERP and legacy systems in place. Production and manufacturing plants sprawl across various locations across the globe. There are a number of machines operating in the plants with a large number of moving parts within those machines. Many people over many years service or repair the machines and purchase replacement parts for them. Materials are dispersed across many warehouses with every division following different sourcing and, in many cases, inefficient strategies.

This gives a clear picture of how enormous amounts of inaccurate master data piles up over the years. The bulk of material, supplier, customer and product master data is inaccurate, inconsistent de-duplicated, unclassified or misclassified and outdated. This leads to degradation in data reliability. Several negative business outcomes stem from failure to control and manage MRO item and supplier master data:

• Bloated inventory and high obsolescence;
• Invisible and undocumented inventory;
• High carrying costs;
• Increased plant downtimes; and
• Inability to manage spend and reduce total MRO consumption.

With such MRO scenarios playing out every day all over the world, there is a pertinent need of master data management to cleanse the historical master data, optimize the indirect supply chain and sourcing initiatives and streamline the data governance workflow across the organization. Master data management is a comprehensive strategy to build a single, accurate and authoritative source of a company’s information assets and deliver this on demand as a service.

An effective master data management initiative is composed of two key parts: historical data cleansing and ongoing data maintenance.

1. Historical data cleansing involves classification and business-value enrichment of the existing legacy data across all the systems, applications and organizational units of an enterprise. It ensures enterprise wide visibility of the material and supplier bases leading to efficient MRO asset management and supply base rationalization.

2. Ongoing data maintenance involves maintaining quality of data on an ongoing basis and creating a framework for the creation, use, access and maintenance of data across the organization, leading to enhanced operational efficiencies and improved sourcing strategies.

This adds immense value to the MRO and strategic sourcing initiatives of an organization, driving significant bottom-line savings and achieving enhanced business and operational efficiency.

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Nupur Agrawal is the analyst and public relations lead with Zynapse. For more information, visit www.zynapse.com.

Did you begin the New Year with  resolutions? While at home you probably want to loose weight, exercise more, eat healthy, clean out the attic, etc. — at work, did you resolve to finally get those improvement initiatives off the ground and start showing results? Have you had any success yet? If not, ask yourself, “Why?” Go deep; don’t stop by blaming people and things you don’t control.

Like it or not, you were a part of that failure. What did you miss? What did you do? What did you not do? At home, it’s easy to take the blame — no one else knows anyway. But at work, you can’t get away with that. Those resolutions you made are like projects you’ve started and allowed to sputter to a halt.

Common reasons include lack of budget, lack of management support, lack of buy-in from the shop floor, poor project management, unrealistic expectations and the list goes on. Each of those is avoidable with the right preparation and execution of your initiatives.

Your improvement project doesn’t begin when you get the go-ahead from your boss. It begins at the conceptual stage when the need or requirement is identified. You know that planning works to ensure successful implementation of maintenance work. Extend that thinking to your project.

Right from the very start you have the opportunities to set the stage for success — secure the buy-in, find the project sponsors, identify the real extent of resources and time you will need, dig for enough information to have a realistic budget, avoid the temptation to understate costs and overstate benefits, put a realistic plan in place, etc. As in good work management, failure to plan is planning to fail.

We all know we should do this, yet many of us don’t follow through. It is like knowing exercise is good for our health and not exercising. It takes more than an intellectual awareness to motivate us. We need to “own” the need and the actions that follow — or the choice becomes a choice to fail. When we get into trouble with our projects, it’s like discovering too late we have some incurable yet avoidable disease.

The long-term benefits to your company from your project, like the long-term health benefits from exercising, need to be compelling enough to you now to justify the efforts required to ensure success. They need repetition and constant “selling” to everyone involved or they will lose sight of the goal. Stay engaged and keep everyone involved engaged and informed as well. Without it, you will lose resolve and fail. With it, you can choose success.

2012 holds a lot of promise for those who choose to see it — will you see it, too?

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James Reyes-Picknell of Barrie, Ont.’s Conscious Asset Management is a certified management consultant specializing in operations excellence and asset management. You can reach him at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Working round the clock to accommodate client needs is business as usual for Mississauga, Ont.-based Provincial Partitions, which was able to supply four ready-to-ship Proflex containers to a leading engineering designer, manufacturer and solution provider for the water and wastewater treatment industry.

Each Proflex container was modified to include standard and roll-up doors for easy access, HVAC, windows and mechanical tie-in for all utilities. Checker plate steel flooring and metal interior walls were used throughout. Transport to Africa was easily facilitated because these modified shipping containers are inherently designed primarily for transport either by truck, rail or ocean.
 
The company believes an idea whose time has come is the use of shipping containers as modular units. The newly introduced line of Proflex units provides an economical and efficient variety of combined office/storage space solutions. With more than 30 years in the modular industry, it is suited to modifying these containers. Potential uses for these buildings include: field offices, storage buildings, hazardous material storage, barracks and housing for relief efforts.
 
Provincial Partitions has been providing modular space solutions for more than 30 years. Building on experience with interior plant and office space, it developed interior and exterior buildings for use as storage enclosures, kiosks, guardhouses, interior and exterior preassembled offices and other special purpose buildings.
www.pro-part.com

PAS 55, the Publicly Available Specification: 55-1:2008 for Asset Management, is rapidly gaining worldwide acceptance as good-practice guidance for optimizing asset management systems and processes, and reducing risks to people, the environment and business. Developed by the Institute of Asset Management in collaboration with the British Standards Institution, PAS 55 is well on its way to becoming an ISO standard.

For asset-intensive organizations in particular, PAS 55 is already proving to be an essential, objective definition of what’s required to demonstrate competence, establish improvement priorities and make clearer connections between strategic organizational plans and the day-to-day realities of asset and work management. The PAS 55 approach to whole-life asset management is based on the widely used Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) cycle for continuous improvement:

• Plan. Establish the asset-management (AM) strategy, objective, plans and performance measures needed to deliver results in alignment with the organization’s AM policy and strategic plan.

• Do. Establish enablers for implementing AM, such as enterprise asset management (EAM) software and other essential requirements (e.g., regulatory), and implement the AM plan(s).

• Check. Monitor and measure results against AM policy, strategic objectives, regulatory and other requirements; then record and report the results.

• Act. Take actions to ensure AM objectives are achieved, and continuously improve the AM system and performance.

To drive the asset-management PDCA cycle, organizations should create an asset-management policy that provides direction on how to effectively manage physical assets in line with strategic direction. Without such a policy, they will have difficulty realizing the benefits of PAS 55. Organizations should also establish an asset-management strategy to define how the policy will be implemented, outlining specific direction and high-level initiatives.

Additionally, asset-management enablers — that is, the organizational structure of roles, responsibilities, authorities and tools to carry out the top-level strategic plan — should be identified. This is essential because it’s accountable people, not just policies, who ensure sound asset management.

Another important step is developing objective-specific asset-management plans that will enable the business to implement change, carry out asset-management functions and detect potential defects before they escalate into incidents that might impact safety, the environment or operational performance, and/or increase the cost of initiating maintenance.

Because PAS 55 requires that organizations engage in both reactive and proactive monitoring of risk, measurements for asset management must be instituted as well. Additionally, a system should be deployed for tracking the success of the initiative throughout the lifecycle of an asset, understanding how that asset works with other elements in an organization and how multiple interdependencies can by managed and optimized for greater performance and output.

Leveraging EAM Software
For asset-intensive businesses to effectively adopt PAS 55, they need a standardized method for identifying, tracking and managing the condition of every known asset, managing risk before it becomes a problem, standardizing the asset-registry process and generating reports that show compliance to plans and strategic direction. Implementing a modern EAM solution aligned with PAS 55 can help ensure success by allowing organizations to:

• Manage Risk Proactively: PAS 55 mandates proactive risk resolution. Therefore, a company’s EAM solution should feature built-in risk assessment and management into inspections and defects, standard jobs, work requests and work orders. By collecting and analyzing all current defects and the risks they pose to the business across the enterprise asset base, a system of this capacity can help organizations ensure safety by understanding the potential risks as well as knowing what actions to take to mitigate them before they become serious issues.

• Know the Condition of Every Asset: PAS 55 requires that asset managers know the current condition of each asset. Therefore, organizations should employ an EAM solution that incorporates “inspection” and “defects” functionality, and can automatically calculate the current condition of each asset based on responses to inspection questions, and then automatically send out a triggered response if required.

• Standardize the Asset-Registry Business Process: An EAM solution should provide a simple and effective approach for registering assets in line with PAS 55 guidelines. It should enable the collection of asset data as mandated by PAS 55, while ensuring asset registers do not become overly cumbersome or complex. It also should allow for the collection of data relating to currently unregistered assets, ensuring that data quality is maintained and available in the field.

Embracing PAS 55 guidelines can allow organizations to effectively assess the gap between their current procedures and those considered to be optimal asset management activities. PAS 55 can also help:

• Align their asset management approach with overall business strategy;
• Foster a culture centered on quality, safety, risk management and continuous improvement; and
• Maximize return on their assets by increasing uptime of mission-critical equipment and facilities.

Mincom believes the PAS 55 standard will rapidly achieve global acceptance and will be adopted as an ISO standard for the management of physical assets. Since the PAS 55 was first published in 2004, Mincom has been in the forefront of supporting its customers to align with PAS 55 guidelines — and has applied PAS 55 at the foundation of its EAM software design and development methodology.

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John Benders is the vice-president of asset intensive industry solutions with Mincom. For more information, visit www.mincom.com.

It is incredible how often the CMMS takes the blame for why the maintenance department is not able to make any significant improvements. Some claim their systems are hopelessly antiquated. Others say they bought the wrong software package or that users are not doing what they are supposed to do.

However, the CMMS is rarely the bottleneck to improvement. The real opportunity to exploit even a legacy CMMS starts with resolving those nasty issues that have plagued the company for years: fundamental strategic, policy, procedural or management issues — not system issues — that impede attempts to maximize the value of a CMMS. Indeed, the system may fit perfectly the needs and technical specifications of the company, yet there is still no agreement on how the tool can best be used. Radical change is sometimes required to break the deep-rooted habits of the past.

The four types of issues can be defined as follows:

1. Strategic issues: These are issues that speak to the vision, mission and fundamental goals and objectives of the company (such as the need to create a learning organization through extensive training programs offered to employees).

2. Policy issues: Depending on the strategy of the organization, policies are established that guide employees on how to conduct business (such as the need to have every tradesperson take a mandatory 10 days of job-related training per year).

3. Procedural issues: Procedures are established to ensure policies are followed correctly (such as a need to define a procedure for developing a training plan each year specifying who needs what training, and how to implement it).

4. Management issues: If a tradesperson is not adhering to policy or following the proper procedures, then there is an issue if management fails to take action (such as a need for supervisors to allow their tradespeople to go on the training course on how to make better use of the CMMS, despite the extensive backlog of work).

Listed below are common strategic, policy, procedural and management issues that companies are wrestling with when replacing, upgrading or trying to get more out of a CMMS. If these issues are not dealt with prior to implementing a new system, everyone will blame the CMMS for the continuing problems. In some cases, these issues will impact the specification of the system, depending on how they are resolved. However, each issue has a component that is completely independent of the choice of CMMS.

For example, one common issue is to what extent machine operators will be involved in maintaining their equipment. This may not impact system requirements, in that the system doesn't really “care” whether a maintenance or production worker has done the maintenance, enters the data or outputs the reports. However, the success or failure of the entire CMMS implementation can rest with this single issue, with the CMMS acting helplessly as the scapegoat.

This is because unless operators begin to take seriously the care and maintenance of their equipment, in the same way that most now care about the quality of the product, then the maintenance workers will feel that it is a waste of time to complete work orders for the same old problems. Operators will complain that the system is not improving the response rate of maintenance to their problems, nor the quality of the repairs. Maintenance will insist that nobody looks at the reports off of the CMMS to see that problems are repeatedly caused by operators who are poorly trained and don't care about the equipment.

For those companies that have already implemented a CMMS, problems are compounded by the fact that people have begun to mistrust or even blame the system, making it more difficult to identify and resolve the true issues. Any continuous improvement methodology (Lean, Six Sigma, etc.) can be employed to find, prioritize and eliminate these barriers to change. The difficulty is always influencing people’s attitude and changing their behaviour for the long term, at all levels of the organization.

Discussion Questions
By discussing and answering the following questions, you may uncover improvement opportunities, through resolution of some old and thorny strategic, policy, procedural and management issues:

1. What is the role of the maintenance supervisor, planner, storekeeper, etc., regarding the CMMS? Who has what level of access into which modules, menus, reports and functions?

2. Who administers the system and what will be that person's responsibilities?

3. To what degree can users manipulate the design of screens, menus and reports generated by the CMMS?

4. What portion, if any, of maintenance costs should be charged to production departments? Should spare parts be expensed when issued from stores or upon purchasing? What about consumables such as nuts, bolts, and safety supplies? What about capital projects that require stock items?

5. Should fixed asset and accounting work centre numbers from Accounting be adopted or cross-referenced in the CMMS?

6. Should labour hours recorded via the CMMS be transferred electronically to the payroll system or should a separate data collection exist for payroll purposes? How often should information pass to the payroll system?

7. Who has the authority to initiate work requests? (Should operators?) How can a proliferation of repeat, unnecessary, or vague work requests be avoided? Who determines priority of work requests? Can work requests be phoned in or passed verbally to tradespeople walking by?

8. Who should plan the work orders and assign them to individual tradespeople?

9. Should contracted services be used, and to what degree, instead of internal maintenance resources?

10. Who (tradespeople, supervisors, maintenance management, maintenance purchasing, general purchasing) should order what material? What about during emergency downtime? How can rush orders be minimized?

11. How do we account for and locate spare parts and consumables kept outside central stores (eg. on a given production line, on trucks, with an outside contractor)? How do we control stock issuances outside of day shift?

12. Should estimated hours be provided for all work orders? Where will estimates come from (historical records, engineered standards, etc.)?

13. Should work orders be issued prior to material being available?

14. When tradespeople identify follow-on work as a result of a given work order, should they expand the existing work order or begin a new one?

15. How should we account for a supervisor/planner's time when planning large jobs?

16. What approval levels should be established? What if the approving authority is unavailable?

17. What happens if a job begins to exceed the original estimated cost, eg., should it be re-approved?

18. Will variances to estimated labour hours be used for disciplining a maintenance worker? Who will take what action if variances occur? How big must the variance be to take such action?

19. How often will operations require what feedback (on-line, daily, weekly, etc.)?

20. How detailed should PM routines be?

21. How do we ensure that PM routines are completed satisfactorily?

22. Should operators perform PM routines? Should these routines be recorded onto the CMMS? Should operators input directly onto the system?

23. Should maintenance workers input their own work order and time information (such as at a terminal or using a handheld device)?

24. At what value are repaired parts returned to inventory?

25. For multi-plant environments, to what degree should head office or the larger plants influence which CMMS package should be run in each plant, and how it should be set up? (For example, should head office “force” small plants to adopt the maintenance module of an enterprise-wide ERP solution?)

Optimizing a mining process requires an initial understanding of all parties involved. It is important to know what is at stake from one process to the next and, just as important, to know the stakeholders. Whenever the implementation of a real-time maintenance management system is discussed, the most commonly identified groups are operations and maintenance departments.

However, limiting the stakeholders to these departments alone misses the bigger picture — ignoring several groups within mining organizations and the industry at large that benefit from the information gathered. Implementing a real-time maintenance system directly impacts several groups whose active involvement in the implementation process allows faster recognition of the inherent benefits.

Who holds a stake?
It is well established that maintenance managers rely heavily on information to develop long-term strategies. To ensure current equipment can meet future demands, managers require information on fleet reliability, cost and operating characteristics. Superintendents and supervisors implement maintenance plans based on priority, manpower and cost of repairs. Planners and schedulers work to predict preventive maintenance schedules, component replacement intervals and warrantee work based on the information provided them. Maintenance engineering groups desire the necessary data to understand and research opportunities for continuous improvement. Finally, mechanics desire to work efficiently, without constantly changing priorities.

Operations departments gain from maintenance planning, scheduling, diagnostics and predictive process optimizations. Operational managers and superintendents examine specific details of the mine plan, seeking ways equipment configurations can meet or surpass material movement goals. Field supervisors and fleet dispatchers require maintenance schedules for equipment rotation and daily plans to maximize their production goals. Lastly, operators depend on maintenance to provide equipment that operates safely and reliably.

Supporting departments play a huge role in the day-to-day and long-term plans of successful organizations. Tire shops, lube and fuel services, and reliability-centred maintenance (RCM) technicians all rely on operations and maintenance to work cohesively for operational and mechanical excellence. Tire life, rotations and budgeting are determined by reviewing available information. Inconsistent or non-existent data regarding tire life can cause large discrepancies in the operational budget. Lube and fueling operations provide the lifeblood of the equipment. Without information on fluid levels, production is compromised. RCM technicians ensure oil, vibration, ultrasound and thermal imaging, providing information back to the organization facilitating value-added decisions on machinery health. Without predictable schedules from maintenance, repairing or replacing onboard technology, or performing RCM tasks, adds to unscheduled downtime.

In modern mines, there are onsite groups ensuring the regulatory agencies expectations are exceeded. These reporting parties help maintenance and operations provide environmentally sound processes and employee safety. Safety departments audit and report on the organization’s ability to provide the safest equipment and working conditions for the employees. Environmental services must be able to view and report on carbon emissions and the success of the fluids management.

OEMs continuously strive to produce better components and outperform their competition. There are also opportunities for contract maintenance, which requires cost control and KPI tracking to maintain customer satisfaction. Providing real-time data to the experts leads to long-term maintenance success and, at times, information to help OEMs produce better products.

A real-time maintenance system with remote monitoring and data capturing abilities assists all of these stakeholders in achieving capacity assurance. The keys to its effectiveness — to a significant ROI — are the proper implementation and organizational participation. Once groups recognize they hold a stake, they must play their part and work together. Overall, maintenance management software is a steppingstone towards the integration of proactive maintenance into daily routines and continuous improvement.

What are the benefits?
Moving forward with an insertion of technology and data into the maintenance realm has numerous benefits, which allow an organization to move beyond the reactive practices of post-failure download diagnostic or having operators report abnormal conditions occurring onboard. The new proactive process is relatively easy to implement, providing immediate returns to the entire organization.

Furthermore, the remote data collection aspect of a maintenance system allows for an organization to institute reliability engineering or RCM practices in addition to the real-time maintenance. RCM implements engineering analysis of the operating characteristics of components and ensures resistance to failure, typically measured by mean time between failures (MTBF). Also, RCM implements the engineering analysis into a predictive model to identify the probability a failure is likely to occur. The focus on acting early will result in less repair time and lower repair costs, which translates to predictive maintenance.

Real-Time Benefits
In a fleet management system, all equipment has operational data captured regardless of type or model. Having all of these data gathered and displayed in one single software package optimizes the troubleshooting, actions and reporting, eliminating the need for separate software packages for each OEM. Real-time maintenance systems show active alarm conditions for all equipment regardless of manufacturer, immediate diagnostics for an active fault code through snapshots and the association of the troubleshooting or repair guides for alarms.

Viewing real-time raw sensor data can indicate the root cause of faults as well as parts necessary to fix, perform preventive maintenance (PM) inspections, or provide the details necessary to identify a larger issue — whose immediate correction could avoid a catastrophic failure. The application also reduces the time to dispatch a mechanic to an equipment unit or simply eliminates unnecessary trips. However, to limit the benefits to a single group or department will hinder acceptance; delaying deployment and ROI. Identifying and maximizing the benefits for each stakeholder will amplify the acceptance and shorten the timetable for successful implementation.

Remote Data Collection Features
Historical information and data collection for analysis can move an organization from reacting to alarm conditions in order to prevent an impending failure to a more proactive approach involving statistical analysis, component-level root-cause analysis and failure mode effects analysis. This is what is expected through historical analysis and research. The benefits typically are listed only to assist those directly assigned to ensure reliability. To ensure successful implementation, a stakeholder must again be aware of the entire organization and recognize all potential benefits of remote data collection.

Abnormal conditions can lead to larger failures or reduce the overall ability of equipment to perform at the desired level. Behind these alarms are the individual sensors with raw values triggering notifications. The context surrounding these signals provides the details necessary to prevent continual accumulation of abnormal conditions. While sensor information is critical, detailed logs for unscheduled downtime events are also necessary to better understand opportunities for improvement. Time tracking allows detailed information that can be related back to the abnormal or alarm conditions being captured in the system.

Temperatures, pressures, speed and operating conditions, among other factors, are critical to understanding the history behind the capacity of a particular component, and whether it is achieving the desired productivity and/or life cycle. When looking to implement technology to improve performance or reduce costs, looking beyond just maintenance benefits will ensure success.

Real-time maintenance systems are designed to allow users to take raw data and convert that into information — and to then take action. This concept is used frequently, and it should be a focus for an organization considering maintenance management technologies. All this should come back to benefits. A system’s ability to turn data into information and information into action should benefit as many groups inside the organization as possible. Implementation without organizational buy-in is possible, but with microscopic tracking of return on investments, it is not probable. Once groups recognize they are stakeholders in the implementation, that there are qualitative and quantitative benefits to all parties, organizational buy-in and acceptance is achievable. The entire organization participating and benefiting from the decision to implement technology into their maintenance program will ultimately provide a sustainable and repeatable predictive/preventive maintenance ratio. When the ratio is sustainable and repeatable, the entire organization is successful.

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Justin Johnsen is the maintenance product manager at Modular Mining Systems Inc. For more information, visit www.mmsi.com.