Symbiosis Institute of Operations Management

Supply Chain Management Excellence Program (SCMExP)- Wabtec Corp.

Module: Maintenance Management

Q1. The challenges related to Maintenance function and Describe the Maintenance strategy,
tools, and techniques to be adopted to address the challenges. (25 marks)

One of the many reasons for the industry’s best performance would be on the best side the
company’s maintenance policy. The high maintenance costs, increasing down time,
nonavailability of spare parts on time are the causes of concern that lead to the productivity loss.
Successful companies, whose equipment down time is minimal, attribute the reason to the
planned and scheduled maintenance, controlled spending on equipment, tracking of
maintenance activities and optimization of spare parts and inventories.

Maintenance may be defined as actions necessary for retaining or restoring a piece of

equipment, machine, or system to the specified operable condition to achieve its maximum
useful life.
Also, maintenance can be look as “all actions which have the objective of retaining or restoring
an item in or to a state in which it can perform its required function”. The actions include the
combination of all technical and corresponding administrative, managerial, and supervisory
actions.
The primary objective of maintenance is to ensure that physical assets continue to fulfill their
intended functions throughout the lifetime of the assets. However, if asset is not maintained the
effects are, high equipment downtime, production losses and deferment, high product unit cost,
poor quality control etc.

TYPES OF MAINTENANCE:
There are two types of maintenance in use:

• Corrective Maintenance: The maintenance which is required when an item has failed or
worn out, to bring it back to working order. It is carried out after fault recognition and
intended to put an item into a state in which it can perform a required function. This
maintenance is often most expensive because worn equipment can damage other parts
and cause multiple damage. Corrective maintenance is probably the most used approach,
but it is easy to see its limitations. When equipment fails, it often leads to downtime in
production. In most cases this tends to be costly to the business. Also, if the equipment
needs to be replaced, the cost of replacing it alone can be substantial. Corrective
maintenance is carried out on all items where the consequences of failure or wearing out

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 are not significant and the cost of this maintenance is not greater than preventive
maintenance. This type of maintenance can be regarded as unplanned, emergency,
breakdown maintenance.

Usually corrective maintenance carried out in four steps:

• 1st step  collection of data, information, and Analysis
• nd
2 step  identifying the causes
• 3rd step  find out the best possible solution to illuminate likely causes
• 4th step  Implement those solutions

• Preventive Maintenance: This is the care and servicing by personnel for the purpose of
maintaining equipment and facilities in satisfactory operating condition by providing for
systematic inspection, detection, and correction of incipient failures either before they
occur or before they develop into major defects. This type of maintenance has many
different variations and is subject to various researches to determine the best and most
efficient way to maintain equipment. Recent studies have shown that Preventive
maintenance is effective in preventing age related failures of the equipment. For random
failure patterns which amount to 80% of the failure patterns, condition monitoring proves
to be effective. So, to avoid the problems of correcting unfortunate situations that have
already arisen, many try to maintain equipment before it fails. By doing this, the goal is to
avoid failure, unnecessary production loss and safety violation. This type of maintenance
can as well be regarded as Planned, Predictive, Condition based, Running, Opportunity
and Reliability Centered maintenance.

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Challenges of Maintenance Function in Wabtec

Maintenance has huge variety of challenges every day, many of which can significantly impact
the effectiveness of maintenance programs, reduce production, and risk the safety of their team.

Some most common maintenance challenges in Wabtec are:

Managing the costs of aging assets

As an asset begins to age, a significant challenge Maintenance Managers face is ensuring they
spend the optimum level of expense money (OPEX), at the right time, to maintain the highest
level of integrity and reliability that ensures continuous production and the safe operation of the
facility.

Ultimately, to be efficient spend the right amount of money to achieve this level of integrity and
reliability - which can be a difficult balance to achieve. And I have found time after time that
maintenance teams tend to overspend their allocated maintenance budget, because they don’t
have a clear understanding of the relative risk associated with the failure of their equipment.

The key to overcoming this challenge requires not only assessing the risk associated with each
element of the plant, but also determining how these risk rankings come together to form the
basis of your planned maintenance and inspection programs.

Considerations and Strategy:

 Have a clear and well understood RACI (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, and
Informed) program in place, so that the right level of management is making the decisions
for expensive corrective work.
 Aging assets all have repair histories that can be trended. Look at those trends to help
determine the next inspection or planned maintenance.
 Ask the manufacturers for a list of other companies that have the same equipment at a
similar age and in similar service, and then contact these companies for additional insight.
 Be aware that when you operate outside the stated integrity operating window (IOW), your
inspection and planned maintenance intervals will no longer be applicable. If your plant
operates outside of these IOWs, risk will usually be heightened, and inspection intervals
need to be shortened.

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Knowing when to carry out inspections and maintenance
Unexpected rotating or fixed equipment failure can result in significant production losses, or
worse, environmental, or human losses for a company. Avoiding this type of failure is therefore
at the top of the priority list.

A best in class preventative maintenance and inspection program comes down to intervals. But
when is the right time to conduct routine maintenance? Is it when the manufacturer says it’s
time, or when the plant says it’s time?

Considerations and Strategy:

 Plan maintenance based on risk of equipment failure

While the recommended maintenance time intervals provided by the OEM (original
equipment manufacturer) can sometimes work, I have found that building an inspection
and preventative maintenance program based on risk is far more effective, and results in
a drop in unexpected failures and an increase in uptime.

 Ensure that the top senior leaders of the facility take ownership, and support your riskbased
program through funding and people

Planned maintenance programs are expensive and take time - many takes as long as 3
- 5 years to design and implement successfully. If senior management doesn’t have a
long-term view and commitment of people and resources, then your program is set to fail.

Maintenance process establishment as per ISO standard

Maintenance process establishment was big challenge for us. We had verity of equipment’s in
MEP and P&E section. We have finalized our goals and started work in mission mode. We
completed below activities for startups.

Considerations and Strategy:

 Equipment’s list preparation.

 SOP finalization for utility operation and plant maintenance for all different activities.
 Risk assessment for all different kind of activities.
 Preventive maintenance planning.

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  Daily operator level check sheet implementation for monitoring the critical operation
parameter

Spares & consumables procurements and Inventory management

Spares and consumables list and its procurement was also a big challenge for us. We have
started making the equipment’s wise list of spares and consumables. We made the complete
spares list and then started procurements as per their life. In 1st year we focus for only the
consumables and C class items.
For maintaining the minimum quantity of spares consumables, we finalized its MSL (Minimum
stock level) level and start uploading the data into the Maximo for its control and auto alert.
Considerations and Strategy:

 Spares & consumables list preparation.

 Understanding existing (or projected) consumption.
 Calculating system failure costs.
 Work with vendors for cost-reduction and in-stock improvement
 Calculate costs (hard and soft) of expedited orders

Shifting the balance from corrective to planned maintenance

When a plant does nothing but corrective or reactive maintenance, often see teams losing sight
of the bigger picture - which is to perform proper planned maintenance to avoid such
breakdowns. And these unexpected shutdowns can often result in blown budgets and missed
production targets.

Frustratingly, it can seem almost impossible to get ahead of the backlog to become more
proactive and implement a planned and risk-based preventative maintenance program.

Continuous performance measurement is absolutely key to knowing if you’re working on the right
maintenance, following your plan, and achieving your budget, and will help you make that shift
from a predominantly corrective and reactive maintenance plan, to a more planned and proactive
plan.

Considerations and Strategy:

 Risk assess all rotating and fixed plant equipment with solid risk-based inspection (RBI)
and reliability-centered maintenance (RCM) programs
By doing this, we can set your inspection and planned maintenance intervals accordingly.

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  Track and trend all repair histories
By keeping track of repair histories, we can trend failures and potentially predict the next
bad actor.

 Focus on most important maintenance KPIs

For starters, consider tracking preventative versus corrective maintenance work orders,
plotted against downtime. We will know the planned maintenance program is starting to
work when you see a shift from CM to PM, and an increase in stream factors.

By measuring these KPIs, we have the full picture of our maintenance effectiveness, and
can set ourselves challenging but achievable goals to continue improving our team’s
performance.

 Ensure data is being input into CMMS correctly and consistently

If there is bad data in CMMS, then the tracking KPIs becomes inaccurate. Take the time
to prepare the data behind KPIs, so that we can have the clearest view of our performance
possible.

Creating a culture of teamwork and shared responsibility

We all know it takes teamwork to effectively manage and run a group of assets, but a huge
challenge I have witnessed is when maintenance teams are working within imbedded functional
(e.g. maintenance, operations, engineering) silos, that reflect the historical culture of the plant.

Teamwork is a high priority and a valued trait and is regularly recognized and rewarded.

Considerations and Strategy:

 Every plant needs a rally point to tear down silos. A reduction in OPEX or an increase in
stream time usually works.
 Take the time to understand the issues experienced by both silos when working together
previously and construct joint sessions to work through those issues together.
 Change the way business is done by instituting new lines of communications and inviting
members of all silos to participate in necessary planning sessions.
 And most importantly, get senior level buy-in by instituting a legitimate and generous
recognition and rewards program.

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Wabtec Maintenance Tools

MAXIMO Tool
User raise their concerns into the Maximo tools and maintenance team will respond based on
below priorities.

• Safety concern
• Breakdown complaints
• User complaints
• Abnormalities
• Improvements / KAIZEN, etc.

For inventory management of spares & consumables we have uploaded all the inventory in
Maximo and defined it’s MSL for its automatic PR generation and alert for spare consumables
stock maintaining. Now if any spare goes below MSL level system send an alter mail to all
registered person on weekly basis.

TMS (Township Management System)

This Application can be used to raise a request or incident regarding the concern related to
Plumbing, Electrical, Civil and Others in the Township of Marhowrah and maintenance team will
respond based on below priorities.

• Plumbing
• Electrical
• Civil
• Carpentry
• Others

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