Fixing Maintenance

The Power Industry

Introduction

Fixing Maintenance

Energy utilities require optimization of asset management as never before. Maintenance personnel bear the burden of sustaining reliability and availability and are personally in the spotlight the instant an interruption or failure occurs. Yet without the right resources and tools at their disposal, one can argue that it is not the staff but the focus on maintenance that is broken. This article addresses some of the challenges faced by utilities today and reasons to recalibrate your maintenance priorities.

Brain Drain: Workforce Knowledge

Experienced maintenance craftsmen are an aging breed and replenishments are not coming in quickly enough. Much of the current workforce is nearing retirement and maintenance is less often perceived as a viable career path by today’s young engineers. The perception of job stability is being hammered by workforce reductions, outsourcing and the export of jobs and entire operations overseas. According to Joel Leonard, president of PulsePointe Technologies LLC, “Analysts currently predict a 40-70% workforce reduction over the next 10 years, while assets continue to age and replacements are increasingly sophisticated.”

A solid enterprise asset management (EAM) solution mitigates the risk of a diminishing skilled workforce and shortens the learning curve for new technicians. EAM solutions secure maintenance expertise in the form of proven job standards and equipment history. They capture critical knowledge and generate key performance indicators so that information can be pushed to decision makers at the right time, as well as a historical repository so that trends are evident and continuous improvement is possible. Analytics are also provided so that downtime and overhauls can be strategically timed to minimize costs and disruption to electricity supplies.

Aging Infrastructure Under Pressure

While global power executives have long recognized that the underlying infrastructure is aging, demand for generation and transmission capacity is unprecedented. Furthermore, utilities are under immense shareholder pressure to reduce costs, increase efficiency and compete for customers. The investment in new transmission lines has dropped sharply and vegetation management is not ideal. The grid is increasingly vulnerable to failures and profits are at risk. In a recent report card by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) on America’s infrastructure, the category of Energy received a grade of D+.

Understanding that wholesale upgrades are not in the forecast, every effort must be made to ensure that existing equipment is correctly maintained and capacity optimized. Leonard notes that, “properly maintained equipment will last 30 to 40 percent longer than poorly maintained equipment.” Also, utilities investing in predictive technologies for their most critical assets require a link to an EAM solution so that precious time, i.e. capacity, is not lost when an anomaly is detected. Early warning of impending failure can automatically trigger generation of pre-planned work, ensuring availability of the right tools, parts, equipment and skills are available to minimize downtime. The embedded best practice maintenance techniques deliver enhanced reliability of power sources, higher service levels and realization of long-term bottom line benefits from capital investments.

Oversight: Regulatory Compliance

Since the August 2003 blackout, FERC chairman Pat Wood has strengthened his stance on mandating reliability standards for the national electric grid. Voluntary standards will likely become compulsory with stringent enforcement through FERC reliability audits. Additionally, utilities must strictly adhere to regulatory reporting and compliance relevant to public and workplace safety and fiscal accounting practices.

Advanced EAM solutions support FERC and PUC mandates, government accounting standards and safety requirements as a natural extension of an IT investment. They provide ready access to current obligations, enable proactive adherence and capture a historical record of compliance. EAM delivers the tools and knowledge needed by today’s energy enterprises to best manage the transparency, reliability, stability and security that oversight commissions and constituencies demand.

ERP: Not the Magic Bullet for Fixing Maintenance

In an effort to solve the Y2K crisis while delivering re-engineered work processes, many Tier One utilities looked to ERP systems as a solution. After years of dealing with complex integrations and managing multiple vendors, the idea of a single vendor solution was very attractive. Most ERP solutions have been the result of the outgrowth of a financial application and/or materials and resource planning systems (MRP). These initiatives were almost always driven by the finance side of the utility, to the extent that maintenance requirements were seriously compromised. Oftentimes the question posed to the maintenance organization was “can you make it work,” rather than “will it deliver the optimum return?”

It only makes sense to center major information technology decisions around the one function that has the greatest impact on production capacity – asset management. Capital assets represent the single largest investment in any utility, and the continued availability and reliability of these assets is fundamental to the bottom line. Accounting-based systems are limited in their ability to truly optimize asset and resource management and their ability to deliver meaningful and timely cost information from an operational perspective. Furthermore, advances in technology and architectures have made the integration argument moot.

EAM solutions provide the rich functionality needed to have maximum impact on operational effectiveness, frequently beginning with capital project management. They are uniquely capable of optimizing your entire maintenance program, including preventive, reliability-centered and condition-based strategies. ERP vendors are unable to place a high priority on supplying state-of-the-art EAM capabilities. Ease of use, accessibility to information, reporting flexibility and a myriad of industry-specific functionality is sacrificed, as are basic work effectiveness and efficiencies. Best of breed EAM vendors now provide productized “hooks” to facilitate rapid integration to a utility’s choice of ERP, GIS, SCADA, CBM, CIS, mobile and other complementary systems.

Conclusion on Fixing Maintenance

Take the time to inspect your maintenance practices. Does your staff have the right tools, techniques and technology necessary to sustain efficient, reliable and profitable energy operations? Or is the process broken? Fixing maintenance is the answer.

Sophisticated enterprise asset management (EAM) solutions address collaborative management needs for work, assets, the supply chain, contracts, operational accounting, reporting and analysis, project tracking, safety and compliance and document control. They reach further with seamless integrations into other complementary mission critical information systems. This holistic approach to asset management provides the essentials needed for true operational excellence. If you’re not using one of today’s advanced EAM solutions, now is the time to consider an overhaul.

How to Fix the 70/30 Phenomenon

When you ask front line supervisors or team leaders if all people in their teams are performing to the same standards or if some are doing more work and achieving more results than others, you will often get the same answer. All over the world, the most common answer, after some analysis, verifies that about 30% of the people do 70% of the work.

Zen and the Art of Managing Maintenance

Unfettered expression and spiritual satisfaction? How does this relate to managing a maintenance department, especially one in the U.S. Postal Service? Open your mind. Take a page from the Zen Buddhist monks who preach: When you are quiet and listen, you become aware of sounds not normally heard. USPS maintenance leaders are listening and beginning to understand that maintenance success doesn't come through closed minds and closed doors.

Why do maintenance improvement initiatives fail to deliver? (Hedgehog or Fox?)

It is not uncommon that many reliability and maintenance improvement initiatives fail to deliver expected results. Why is it so? Some of the most common causes I have observed include:

Why Maintenance Improvement Efforts Fail

Why do improvement efforts fail or perhaps not sustain the gains? There are many reasons, but those most often stated are “lack of commitment” and not “following the process”. But why is there lack of commitment, and why aren’t processes followed? Here are a few of the reasons that I’ve seen:

TPM and RCM: Whirled Class

When a piece of production machinery broke down at the Whirlpool plant in Findlay, Ohio, several years back, it was accepted practice for the machine operator to call maintenance and then sit back and wait for the problem to be fixed. Critical information and knowledge was not shared between the operator and maintenance technician. Like many companies, these workers were stuck in traditional roles - operators run the machines, maintenance fixes the machines, and the two do not cross. As a result, productivity opportunities were missed.

Where Do Maintenance Professionals Come From?

Many managers are unaware that best-in-class companies routinely design-out maintenance at the inception of a project. That, clearly, is the first key to highest equipment reliability and plant profitability. Whenever maintenance events occur as time goes on, the real industry leaders see every one of these events as an opportunity to upgrade. Indeed, upgrading is the second key, and upgrading is the job of highly trained, well-organized, knowledgeable reliability professionals.

TPM and Tecate: The New Translation

The true translation — might it be proper to say a new and improved translation? — is being used today by Cervecería Cuauhtemoc Moctezuma, one of the largest brewers of beer in Latin America. Known throughout this company as Mantenimiento Alto Desempeño (MAD), or translated as High-Performance Maintenance, the concept of TPM is alive and well at the company's six plants in Mexico. Perhaps the best example is at CCM's brewery in Tecate, located a short drive from the U.S.-Mexico border on the Baja California peninsula.

Fixing Maintenance