Maintenance Management Consultants – A 35-Year History

Since the inception of Idhammar Konsult AB of Sweden in

1972, we have provided a range of maintenance management
consultant services for our clients.

IDCON, INC is a highly specialized management consultant

firm working within the industry to maximize productivity
through improvement in maintenance and operations
practices. All consultant services are based on the Results
Oriented Reliability and Maintenance™ (RORM)
philosophy. This philosophy has been developed by IDCON,
INC over the years through project experience in the
industry.

Our Products
As maintenance management consultants, our products include education, training and
implementation (consultant services) support covering:

 Current Best Practices (CBP) A training and assessment exercise

 Planning and Scheduling of maintenance work
 Preventive Maintenance/Essential Care and Condition Monitoring
 Basic Equipment Care for Operators
 Spare Parts management
 Root Cause Problem Elimination
 Results Oriented Reliability and Maintenance seminars
 Maintenance books, reliability books
 Operations and Maintenance Productivity Simulation
 Annual Reliability and Maintenance Conference
 International Reliability and Maintenance Benchmarking Expedition

Global Expertise
Our approach, as maintenance management consultants, has been successfully applied in
different industries in 43 different countries within North America, South America, Europe,
Asia and Australia. A list of sample references can be found here.

IDCON, INC, Maintenance Management Consultants in Different Industries

Our approach has been successfully applied in various industries such as: pulp and paper,
steel, chemical, aluminum and mining. It has also been applied in the Fortune 500
manufacturing, automotive, electronics, utilities, food, and forestry products industries.

Declaration of Independence
“ At IDCON, INC, we pride ourselves on our independence. We believe that it is an important
feature of the service and product we provide. We have continuously declined to associate
ourselves with other vendors who have an interest in our customer base. We do not
compromise our integrity and judgment in our dealings with you, our client, by accepting
monetary incentives from the sale or promotion of non-IDCON, INC products or services.

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This means that when you engage us you can be assured that you get our unbiased opinions
and advice with your best interest in mind.”

-Christer Idhammar, President

Impact the Bottom Line

All of our products are designed to have a significant impact on the bottom line and generate
substantial financial benefits.

Compatibility
Our services and products have been successfully implemented and integrated with Total
Productive Maintenance (TPM), Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM), ISO 9000, Total
Quality Management (TQM) and other maintenance and improvement concepts.

=============================================

A. Best Practices
Reliability and Maintenance Management Current Best
Practices part 1
You have been told you that your maintenance cost as a percent of estimated replacement
value (ERV) is 4.6% and that this is too high. Best performers, you are told, should have
maintenance cost lower than 3% of ERV. (Our database shows that the average maintenance
cost as percent of ERV in the process industry is 4.2%.) So, now what do you do about this?

COMPARING MAINTENANCE COSTS.

Before we discuss what you can do, I would like to discuss the reliability of
maintenance cost comparisons between plants. During the last year, I have worked with two
companies that were competing in the same market segment with the same products. For
years, cost comparisons, including maintenance costs, had been made between the two
companies' plants. One company's plants always had the lowest maintenance cost per ton.
Then, these companies merged and "overnight" the maintenance cost for the company with
the lowest maintenance cost per product produced went up 50%!
The reason for this increase was different guidelines for what maintenance to expense
and what maintenance to capitalize. The company with the lowest maintenance cost per ton
capitalized as much as they could, while the other company expensed as much as they could.
When new guidelines were applied, the "low maintenance cost company" was told to follow
the "high maintenance cost company's" guidelines, so, instead of a maintenance cost of $60
per product produced, its cost was now close to $90 per product produced.

ESTABLISHING A RELIABLE ERV.

A reliable ERV is equally difficult to establish. To make an attempt for getting it as close to
right as possible, you need to go back to the original investment of the mill. Then, you have to
decide what index to use for estimating current replacement value. After that, you need to
cluster all investments and divestments, for example, in a three-year time period. When all
this is done, you can calculate ERV.

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Well, I know that you will have to live with all these cost comparisons, and you will continue
to argue over why they might be right or wrong. If the numbers are right and used for trending
your own performance, they can be useful.

The most important matter will still be to do something about improving your
competitiveness and your productivity. So, whatever way you have been measured and
compared, you will have to develop an action plan and then execute this action plan to
improve the numbers used to compare you.

DEFINING CURRENT BEST PRACTICES.

You can name maintenance any three-letter acronym you want, but if you break the
maintenance function down to its elements or practices, you will soon notice that they will all
have to be done in an efficient manner to deliver better performance. So, what are these
practices? Many years ago we defined all these practices and have used them to evaluate and
identify maintenance improvement opportunities in hundreds of maintenance organizations all
over the world. Recently, we sat down again with corporate management of a major
international company to define all these practices. To no one's surprise, these practices were
the same as 30 years ago. It must be explained that these practices only describe WHAT the
best practices are, the execution—or HOW—can vary between plants and also within plants.

I think it can help many organizations to describe some of these practices. It can help you
understand the complete maintenance process. You can also use it to educate others and to
describe job responsibilities. We use it to uniformly evaluate essential reliability and
maintenance processes. We call them current best practices (CBP) to indicate that this is the
best way we know currently—the future will find better practices.

If you want to develop your own CBPs, I advise you to start with structuring the whole
concept into key processes, then sub-processes, and then elements of these sub-processes—
elements that are the ones we call CBPs. When you perform this exercise down to the CBPs,
you will soon notice that you are back to the very basics of maintenance such as alignment,
balancing, filtration, operating practices, etc. It is still on this level that improvements need to
be done in order to increase reliability and lower maintenance costs.

In my June 2001 article on current best practices (CBPs), I suggested that CBPs are structured
in key processes, sub-processes, and elements. Key processes could include leadership,
support facilities, preventive maintenance, planning and scheduling, materials management,
technical database, skills development, etc.

To give an example of what could be included in a key process, I would like to describe how
Part One of the Planning and Scheduling CBP is structured. The complete Planning and
Scheduling CBP includes:

1.Work request
2. Prioritization
3.Back log management
4. Planning
5. Scheduling
6. Execution
7. Recording

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8. CMMS tool
9. Contractor management

Together, these sub-processes comprise about 100 elements.

PLANNING AND SCHEDULING CBP: PART ONE.

The following is an example for Part One of the Planning and Scheduling CBP, which is the
work request. The minimum requirement for a work request includes:

1. Work request is submitted in a computerized maintenance management system

(CMMS) and has a work request ID number.
2. An accurate requested priority is assigned according to the existing guidelines for
priorities.

3. Equipment number, originator, description, and/or location is assigned and verified.

4. A good work description and/or observed symptoms are recorded.

5. Preliminary work order type should be defined as either corrective maintenance or

system improvement (expense or capital work).

6. How the work affects the process is identified according to the recognized
maintenance opportunities.

7. Work request is validated.

8. Workflow process is followed.

9. Known safety requirements are identified.

10. Work request can be entered by anyone in the plant.

11. Work requests are filtered and collected at a central point.

Use the aforementioned elements to evaluate your own practice in this initial part of
planning and scheduling. Make sure you focus on how well the above is actually executed
and not just on how you had intended to execute it. Let me know if you score yourself
better than 75 on a scale of 100. To score at least 75, you must be able to answer "yes" to
all of the following questions:

1. Documentation of process exists. It is communicated to all involved in the process.

2. Process awareness is evident at hourly workforce level and among all requestors.
3. Process is understood and viewed as value added at all levels of the organization.
4. True execution of the process is occurring.

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t is common to find that very little of the above is documented in a work request. It is more
common to find "pump not working" followed by "fix immediately" as the only verbal or
written information.
It is also important to note that the beginning of a maintenance job is called a work request -
not a work order. Such a designation suggests that there is no guarantee the work will be done
just because someone initiated it. This is an obviously necessary procedure if you want to
control costs and prioritize work in the best way. The chart to the left shows an example of
scores for all planning and scheduling sub-processes.

What Constitutes World-Class Reliability and Maintenance?

(part 1)
I have received many calls asking, "How can you tell if an organization is
a world class reliability and maintenance organization or not?"

How well the systems and practices discussed in this column are being
used indicate to me how far a plant has to go to become "world-class”
maintenance and reliability. I would suggest reading this column with a
group of operations and maintenance employees that includes both
management and craftspeople.

More articles about Best Practices

Best Performers
Current best practice-an educational journey
Reliability and Maintenance Management Current Best Practices 1
Reliability and Maintenance Management Current Best Practices 2
Novozyme wins maintenance excellence using IDCON philosophy

On a scale of zero to ten, rate your plant's use of the following systems and practices, with ten
meaning that you are so good that it would probably not pay off to do more improvements in
this area. A five indicates that you feel you do a good job, while a zero means that your
performance is a disaster.

1. We specify, design, and buy assets based on Life Cycle Cost (LCC) instead of lowest cost
to buy. This means that decisions on what to buy are based on costs to buy and costs to own
an asset over its economical life, instead of buying assets solely on purchase price. A world-
class organization has maintenance professionals involved very early in a project. These
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professionals know how to perform reliability and maintainability analyses of systems and
components.
As a result, complete bills of materials, training manuals, and detailed drawings are delivered
according to your documented maintenance standards. Also, guards allow easy inspections on
the run, components requiring frequent maintenance are easily accessible, and so forth.

2. We, as a management team, are focusing on the same results. Operations, engineering,
maintenance, and stores are working toward the same goal. Your organization is jointly
focusing on reliability performance, not on cutting costs until it sees what results it gets. This
means that your whole organization's most important goal is competitiveness through
manufacturing reliability and cost, rather than focusing only on maintenance costs and
perceived maintenance downtime.

As a result, your Overall Production Efficiency continuously increases, and, consequently,

total manufacturing costs decrease. This is very important, because increasing product
throughput to sales generates three to 20 times more revenue in a normal market when
compared with cutting costs for work done to generate the needed reliability for increasing
product throughput.

3. We have developed and documented a reliability and maintenance policy that includes a
three- to five-year improvement plan. This policy is communicated to all employees. This
means that you have described all essential reliability and maintenance elements, their key
performance indicators, why these are important, how people are being recognized when
improving toward goals, the importance of reliability for plant competitiveness, and so forth.

As a result, your employees are well informed and motivated to do their part to continuously
improve toward the same goals. People know which product line to prioritize because they
know what the market demands. Work priorities are not based on emotions. Instead, they are
based on what is best for the plant. There is a certainty of direction and a good understanding
of what the future holds.

4. Craftspeople have a high level of skills and front line supervision adjusts its management
style accordingly. This means that front line supervisors, team leaders, or coordinators do not
need to spend much time instructing people. Instead, they support them through good
planning and scheduling of work, identifying individual training needs, organizing this
training, coaching root cause failure analysis, and other empowering tasks.
As a result, you have a thinking and problem solving organization instead of a reactive one.
People are enthusiastic about what they do. Their griping level is very low, and 10% to 30%
of all maintenance hours, including crafts people's hours, are used on problem solving and
implementation of improvements.

5. Maintenance crafts people's work is limited by their skills, not by rigid craft lines. This
means that you might have only one mechanical craft that includes welders, pipe fitters,
machinists, millwrights, etc., and another craft for electricians and instrumentation. However,
to have this on a piece of paper is not worth anything. Your people are being trained to use all
necessary skills and supervisors are assigning work in a way that reflects your multi skills or
multi craft work practices. At the same time, while you have work flexibility (horizontal
skills), you still have vertical skills in areas such as hydraulics and electronics and other areas
requiring specialists.

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As a result, you find it very easy to plan and schedule work because it involves less people to
do a job that crosses over between traditional craft lines. Your craftspeople's job satisfaction
is also higher after the initial frustration created by the change you might have to go through
to become more flexible.

What Constitutes World-Class Reliability and Maintenance?

(part 2)
Note: This column is a continuation of the January P&P maintenance column by Christer
Idhammar. In that column, Mr. Idhammar asked readers to evaluate how well their mills had
implemented the systems and practices required to become a "world-class" facility.
In this column, I continue discussing the systems and practices that indicate to me that a mill
is "world-class." To evaluate how far your mill has to go to achieve this designation, I would
suggest reading this column with a group of operations and maintenance employees that
includes both management and craftspeople.

On a scale of zero to ten, rate your mill's use of the following systems and practices, with ten
meaning that you are so good that it would probably not pay off to do more improvements in
this area. A five indicates that you feel you do a good job, while a zero means that your
performance is a disaster.

6. Our level of planning and scheduling is high. Whatever you call your maintenance
program, and whatever improvement initiatives you implement, you will find that planning
and scheduling are at the hub of cost-effective maintenance practices. Even programs like
reliability centered maintenance (RCM), total productive maintenance (TPM), reliability
based maintenance (RBM), or other three-letter acronyms for maintenance programs will
soon discover this fact.

Before you rate how well you think you plan and schedule, it is necessary to understand the
basics of these concepts. First of all, planning can be described as all work you do in order to
prepare for a job. These preparations include the final scope of work, safety requirements,
major steps of work, important clearances, spare parts needed and secured as available for
when the job is scheduled, special tools, scaffolding, skills required, time needed to do the
job, and so forth. Secondly, scheduling means to decide when the job will be done and who
will do it.

The following are some effective guidelines for planning and scheduling. When evaluating
how well your mill plans and schedules, examine how well you follow these practices:

A. Planning is done before scheduling.

B. Planning and scheduling are done before execution of the work.
C. Scheduling is done for the work that needs to be done. Then, you find and assign the right
people to do the work.
D. When executing a planned and scheduled job, people are not interrupted to do other work.
E. A job is not finished before you have documented why the job had to be done.
F. You later find the root cause of any identified problems.
If you implement the above planning and scheduling practices, your results will show less use
of outside contractors, less unscheduled overtime, increased overall equipment efficiency
(OEE), less unscheduled downtime, and more free time to perform root cause failure analysis.

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7. We correctly prioritize work. To prioritize work correctly, you must realize the
consequences of not doing the work before a given time. Consequences include
environmental damage/personal injury, high costs for lost production, and/or maintenance and
asset deterioration.
In a plant with multiple product lines, it is necessary, at any given time, to know which line is
the most important to keep running in order to deliver to the customer on time. It is also
important to know what the added value is for the product. In addition, it should be very
difficult to add a job to a closed schedule at your mill. As a result, you will have very few
changes in your weekly/daily and shutdown maintenance schedules. Disciplined priorities will
also lead to correctly performing planning and scheduling tasks.

8. Preventive Maintenance/Essential Care and Condition Monitoring (PM/ECCM) content is

right. To have the right content in your PM/ECCM program, you must base it on the
consequences of not preventing the failure as mentioned in the previous section. Also, the
consequence of a failure must be more "expensive" than the cost of trying to prevent it.
The right content also includes using the right methods for basic inspections and condition
monitoring. This means that you do not have "check," "inspect," or such as the only
descriptions of inspections in your PM/ECCM program. Your methods and descriptions must
be more precise.

Most of your PM/ECCM should be done while equipment is operating. Very little should be
done while equipment is not operating due to inspections, fixed-time maintenance overhauls
and replacements, or other such tasks. Also, PM/ECCM frequencies should be based on
failure developing time and failure distribution, according to results-oriented maintenance
teachings.
As a result, your PM/ECCM program will be very cost-effective. Also, you will do less
PM/ECCM than before you implemented the above principles.

What Constitutes World-Class Reliability and Maintenance?

(part 3)
Note: This column is a continuation of the January and February P&P maintenance columns
by Christer Idhammar. In these columns, Mr. Idhammar asked readers to evaluate how well
their mills had implemented the systems and practices required to become a "world-class"
facility.

In this column, I continue discussing the systems and practices that indicate to me that a mill
is "world class." To evaluate how far your mill has to go to achieve this designation, I would
suggest reading this column with a group of operations and maintenance employees that
includes both management and craftspeople.

On a scale of zero to ten, rate your mill's use of the following systems and practices, with ten
meaning that you are so good that it would probably not pay off to do more improvements in
this area. A five indicates that you feel you do a good job, while a zero means that your
performance is a disaster.

9. PM/ECCM execution IS 100%. If you have the right content in your preventive
maintenance/essential care and condition monitoring (PM/ECCM) program, there is no reason
to have less than 100% completion of the PM/ECCM you have implemented. Operators

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should be trained in essential care and inspections of equipment and should perform most of
these activities when it is practical to do so.
As a result, you will have very few, if any, unplanned and unscheduled maintenance events.
More than half of the work you do during your shutdowns and in weekly/daily schedules will
be as a result of your PM/ECCM program. This, in turn, will give you an opportunity to plan
and then schedule more work. Also, a good PM/ECCM program is a prerequisite to good
planning and scheduling of maintenance and, consequently, to increased overall equipment
efficiency.

10. 85% of spare parts and materials are delivered to the job site. If planning and scheduling
are done correctly, the spare parts store will be in a position to effectively deliver spare parts
and materials to the job site or to designated areas. Or, it will at least stage spare parts in, or
close to, the store area. As a result, you will have very few people going to the store to get
parts or waiting at the store window to get what they need.

11. Service level is 97% for the spare parts store. To maintain a necessary level of trust in
your store system, the service level-getting the right part when you need it-must be very close
to 97%. If it goes much below that level, people will loose trust in your store, and to survive,
they will start building their own stores without the knowledge of the store's management.
This could lead to the store's management falling under the false impression that they are
doing very well in their efforts to reduce the store's inventory, causing them to continue their
current practices. This will eventually lead to less trust in the store's ability to deliver what is
needed when it is needed. As a result of good and cost-effective management of the spare
parts store, you will see that the store's inventory value is decreasing with maintaining the
service level. Also, there will be no unknown and undocumented store items in maintenance
areas, offices, etc.

12. The technical database is 95% correct. The technical database should always be up to
date. Equipment, loop, or electrical circuit identity should be the only thing needed to find and
request or purchase spare parts or other information.
As a result, no time is wasted in searching for store items or other information.

15. The very basics of maintenance are instituted. I have mentioned many times before in this
series of columns that the only major difference between the best performers and others is that
the best performers implement what others only talk about.
Best performers continuously work on improving the very basics of maintenance while others
often overlook them. Some of the maintenance basics that I will discuss in this column
include:

• Detailed cleaning of components

• Lubrication
• Alignment
• Balancing
• Filtration
• Operations practices.

CLEANING OF COMPONENTS. Detailed cleaning of components and equipment is often a

“no man’s land,” because everybody agrees that it is important, but nobody wants to do it. In
a world-class reliability and maintenance organization, components and equipment are
cleaned in detail. Such an organization realizes that good inspections cannot be done without
this level of cleaning and that cleaning also extends the life of components. For example, the
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life of electric motors (electric life) varies between five months for a dirty motor and over 20
years for a clean motor.

LUBRICATION. Best performers also work on continuously improving lubrication. Their

lubricators—because they do believe they need skilled lubricators—are trained in component
wear criteria and required lubrication.

Good lubrication must include such work as improving the choice of lubricant, method of
lubrication, filtration of oil, cooling systems, prevention of water content, and removal of
water content. There are many examples of how this work results in significant life extension,
lower lubrication costs, and increased production throughput.

ALIGNMENT AND BALANCING. Best performers have, and adhere to, alignment
standards of, for example, 0.002 in. or less parallel misalignment for an 8-in. to 10-in.
diameter coupling running at 1,500 rpm in most installations. Precision alignment and
balancing of rotary assemblies results in reduced levels of vibration, longer component life,
lower costs, and increased equipment reliability. On average, a world-class value is 0.1 in./sec
or lower. Several experts in this area have shown a strong correlation between low vibration
level and high reliability and increased production throughput.

FILTRATION. Another maintenance basic is filtration of hydraulic fluids, lubrication

systems, and seal water for mechanical seals. In most cases, standard filters are not good
enough. If you use filters that filter out particles smaller than 5 microns (0.0002 in.), you will
have much fewer problems with leaking hydraulics, bearings, and mechanical seals. For
example, hydraulics will not leak, bearing life will be extended by up to four times, and the
average life of mechanical seals will be over eight years.

OPERATIONS PRACTICES. Best performers teach the operators essential care and
inspection of components and equipment. This includes how to start up and shut down
processes and equipment without causing any damage. In many mills, it is not uncommon that
equipment fails because a steam system was started up too fast, causing equipment failures
because of water hammer and thermal stresses, mechanical seal failure because pumps were
started up before seal water was turned on to the seals, and so forth.

Many readers of this column have e-mailed me with questions about how many evaluation
points there will ultimately be in this series of articles. There could be no end to how long this
list might become, but I do, however, intend to keep it at 20 points. I am also very encouraged
to hear that so many mills are using this list to do a self-analysis of their maintenance
performance; one day I hope to receive those results.
Many other questions that I have received concerned a typical evaluation average. Perhaps
this question is coming up because you find that your mill’s ratings are low. We have done
over 250 similar evaluations in mills worldwide and the average in most mills is between 4
and 5. Best mills rank above 6, and very few are above 7.
Hopefully, this gives you some encouragement. If you rated yourselves above 6, you are
either very good, or you might be overly optimistic or unaware of your actual performance.
Remember that we demanded no fewer than 50% craftspeople to participate in the evaluations
that resulted in the above averages. If only management does the evaluation, ratings tend to be
higher.

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14. Safety standards are very high. Without having enough statistical data to make this a
proven fact, I am convinced that there is a strong relationship between good maintenance
practices and a mill’s safety performance.

The average OIR (OSHA Incident Rate = incidents per 200,000 working hours) for the U.S.
pulp and paper industry is about 8.5, though below 2 is considered good. Even given the fact
that OIR reporting disciplines differ between mills, a mill with a low rating is doing
something different than the average mill. Three things they do better are maintenance
prevention, preventive maintenance, and planning and scheduling.

15. Front-line supervision supervises many crafts (see point 4 in the January P&P
maintenance column). A good organization needs good supervisors. However, the role and
management style of a supervisor must change with the skill level of their craftspeople. To be
effective, systems and procedures must be instituted to support the supervisor and the team of
craftspeople.

If your mill’s craftspeople have a high level of skills, they do not need detailed technical
instruction. Instead, they need support in the form of priorities, planning, and scheduling.
Both craftspeople and supervisors must realize that people skills are more important than
technical skills.
As a result, your mill will see good teamwork, motivated people, and high working morale.
People will also have more time to work on problem solving and to eliminate sources of
failure.

16. Individual training plans are developed and used. As a result of a crafts skills analysis,
your mill will have individual training plans for each craftsperson and supervisor. Your
training is then very focused and cost-effective. You measure training by increased skill
levels, not by the number of training hours. In addition, your mill very rarely lacks the skills
to do a proficient job.

17. Root cause failure analysis. Your mill has established a reliability group as task forces or
as a separate function. You know which problems you should work on, by priority, and you
are continuously designing out problems. Key people are trained in FMEA (Failure Mode and
Effect Analysis) methodologies and are using these skills to solve operations, as well as
equipment, problems.

In a bigger maintenance organization, you have a separate reliability group. Because problems
are a combination of equipment, operations, people, and other factors, this group might not
report to operations or maintenance, but to the mill manager or independent engineering
manager.

As a result, your mill has continuously fewer problems. You do not discuss increasing your
preventive maintenance efforts, but instead you decrease (optimize) predictive maintenance.

18. Use of time. This column includes a table that describes the typical, good, and world-class
distribution and use of time in a maintenance department. If you take some time to study the
figures in the table and compare them to how your maintenance department honestly uses its
time, you might be in for a surprise. Before you do this, however, it is necessary to go through
the definitions for the categories of work used in the table.

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• Daily and weekly work means all work you can do independently, whether or not the
process is in operation.

• Shutdown is all work that requires the process to be down in order to do a safe job.

• Only planned work is all work executed after it has been planned, though it has not been
scheduled. In a pulp mill with a continuous digester, or for a paper machine and other
processes that are difficult to start and stop, this category of work is less common than in a
packaging or finishing area where there are many minor stops and it is easy to stop and start
equipment. However, it is still very cost-effective to use this category where applicable.

• Only scheduled work is all work executed as scheduled before it has been planned. You can
say that you have turned the planning and scheduling process upside down. If you do it
correctly, however, you plan before you schedule.

• Break in work is all work that is added to the schedule after it was closed. Closing time for a
schedule is recommended to be about 19 hours in advance of execution for daily and weekly
work. Closing time is about one week for shorter shutdowns (10 to 12 hours) and four weeks
for a longer shutdown (over five days).

CATEGORY TYPICAL GOOD WORLD-CLASS

Shutdown:
55% 80% 90%
Planned and scheduled work
Shutdown:
2 5
Only planned work ≥5
Shutdown:
20 < 10 0
Only scheduled work
Shutdown:
23 <5 <3
Break work
Daily and weekly:
15 60 65
Planned and scheduled work
Daily and weekly:
5 ≥7 ≥ 10
Only planned work
Daily and weekly:
30 < 10 <3
Only scheduled work
Daily and weekly:
50 < 20 ≤2
Break in work
Daily and weekly:
0 5 > 20
Thinking and solving problems

B. Culture and Management

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Reliability and Maintenance Implementation Model – Step I.
This column is the first in a series of articles about the implementation steps you need to take
if you want to be successful in improving reliability and maintenance, sustain that
improvement and after that continue to improve.

Step I.
“ To tackle a problem from the wrong end can do nothing but harm” This was said by
Confucius, a well known Chinese philosopher who lived around 551-479 BC. Another way of
saying this is that it is important to start off an improvement initiative by Do the Right Things,
then you must learn to do them right. Too often we turn this common sense statement upside
down, we focus on doing things right but do not ask if this is the right thing to do. I have
written about this in many previous articles.
In step I and II you need to; See figure 1.

1. Define and agree on some fundamental principles.

2. Discover your improvement potential.

1. Define and agree on fundamental principles.

These principles include but are not limited to:

 Deciding if this is a Reliability Improvement initiative or cost reduction initiative. In

my opinion the only right things to do is to increase Reliability to reduce Maintenance
cost. It never works the other way around more than for temporary savings, which will
then be followed by higher costs later. See case studies in the September and
November column. Or go to www.idcon.com / Articles.
 The relationship between Operations, Maintenance and Engineering. Is it going to be a
customer and supplier relationship or that of a partnership? As many readers know,
my firm belief is that it has to be a true and equal partnership, the only customer you
have is the one who buys your product. Consequently this improvement initiative is a
joint venture between Operations, Maintenance and Engineering in improving
Production Reliability and lowering Manufacturing Costs.
 Operators’ involvement. It makes sense to include operators in essential; care of
equipment and also some adjustments and repairs.
 Life Cycle Cost. Shall Specification/Design of new equipment be based on Cost to
buy, install, own and scrap equipment and include Reliability and Maintainability
considerations, or shall lowest cost of buying and installing be emphasized more than
cost of ownership?
 Problem identification. Are you going to classify problem such as production losses in
Quality, Time or Speed, Equipment problems etc. by department, or are you going to
define problems and solve them?
 Computer system support. Today it is difficult to find a plant that does not have a
computer system to support effective maintenance, however you need to make sure
that the system you have can support what you want to do.

2. Discover your improvement potential and increase your organization’s awareness.

Many organizations believe they are good but do not know what good really means. If you are
the driver of this improvement initiative you yourself need to know what best practices are
and how you can compare your organization’s performance to these practices. Next step is for
you to start the selling of what you want to do and get some disciples to follow you. A very
13
cost effective way to do this is to bring in an outsider who in one presentation can present best
practices and facilitate your organization to discover how good they are compared to how
good they could be. I know this can be very beneficial to do because I have done it myself in
hundreds of organizations around the world.
In this column I have commented on Step one, the very foundation of your improvement
initiative. As you can see in figure 1, the next step is a formal evaluation of your practices and
performance compared to Current Best Practices. This is where you will pull together your
organization towards the same goals and understandings. I will discuss this step in the
September column. Before it is completed it will be in the shape of a pyramid.

Reliability and Maintenance Implementation Model – Step II.

This column is the second in a series of articles about the implementation steps you need to
take if you want to be successful in improving reliability and maintenance, sustain that
improvement and after that continue to improve.

After you have defined, agreed upon and documented your fundamental beliefs and principles
(Step I – in the implementation pyramid as described in the July column) you should do an
educational evaluation of how your present practices and performance compares to Current
Best Practices – (CBP). We call these practices “Current” because we constantly discover
better practices then the practices we know today. In defining these CBP, we structure them in
nine key processes such as:
1. Leadership and Organization.
2. Planning and Scheduling of Operations and Maintenance.
3. Maintenance Prevention and Preventive Maintenance.
4. Technical Database.
5. Root Cause Problem Elimination.
6. Stores Management interface with maintenance.
7. Facilities, Tools and Workshops.
8. Engineering Interface with maintenance.
9. Skills development.

Some of these Key Processes are divided in sub processes such as Preventive Maintenance,
which is divided in a total of eight sub processes:
3.1 Maintenance Method Selection
3.2 Cleanliness.
3.3 Lubrication.
3.4 Alignment.

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3.5 Balancing
etc.

All key Processes and Sub processes are defined by their elements and it is on this level you
need to evaluate and learn from best practices. Examples on elements include:
“Work Order Backlog is reviewed weekly by operations and maintenance” and
“Work order statuses are updated automatically when parts arrive for awaiting work orders”
Just to mention two of a total of 130 elements within the Planning and Scheduling process.

Most important is that an organization executes these practices. If the process is only
documented, but not executed, it has obviously much less value. In the evaluation you should
therefore distinguish between documentation, execution and tracking, where Execution has
the highest weight.

It is important that the evaluation is well documented and precise in its definitions and scoring
methodology because it will be used as a learning tool and a way to measure progress, or the
lack thereof. Many big corporations have used this structure to do self evaluations in all their
plants.

When you do the evaluation according to a well structured document you will educate your
organization by the fact that the members will themselves discover what the right things to do
are, and how well the organization execute best practices compared to how good they could
be executed. That the organization itself discovers what needs to be done is a very key to
commitment, successful implementation and achieving results in increased production
reliability and lower manufacturing costs. We call this type of education “Discovery based
education”.

We have done hundreds of evaluations of operations and maintenance organizations all over
the world and on a scale of one to 100, the best organization has been rated 75, the average is
36, so there are a lot of opportunities to improve reliability and maintenance.

What you will find is that the biggest improvement potential lies in improving all or part of
the following key Processes:

 Maintenance prevention, Preventive Maintenance.

 Technical Data Base and Store Room management.
 Planning, Scheduling and Control of Operations and Maintenance.
 Root Cause Problem Elimination.

Of course you knew this before. The important thing is that the whole organization must
discover this together. If you do this evaluation with much involvement of your organization
you will not only save a lot of time and money compared to more traditional maintenance
audits, you will also have started improvement initiatives and results.

Step III. You have now aligned your organization and decided what to improve and in which
order you are going to implement improvements. In the November column I will discuss this
step III in more detail.

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Reliability and Maintenance Implementation Model – Step
III.
This column is the third in a series of articles about the implementation steps you need to take
if you want to be successful in improving reliability and maintenance, sustain that
improvement and after that continue to improve in the future.

After you have done the CBP (Current Best Practices) evaluation and discovered, understood
and agreed upon your biggest improvement opportunities you shall not be surprised to find
what you already knew, if you did not, it would be very bad. The difference is that key people
in your organization have discovered this together. You have mutually agreed upon an action
plan that includes roles and responsibilities for both operations, maintenance and engineering.
This is different than traditional audits.

In this column I am only giving you a summary on the key improvement opportunities and the
common actions that often come up among the first steps in improvement plans. (see step III
in the emerging pyramid)

 Maintenance Prevention – We thought we aligned well because we bought laser

alignment tools, we discovered we do not align well. Action: check and realign five
alignment points every shut down.
 Preventive Maintenance – We do too many PM inspections because we have never
integrated what is done by Operators, Electricians, Lubricators and Mechanics.
Action: Reevaluate all PM inspections using CMS - Condition Monitoring Standards
and a system that can merge all PM activities under each equipment identity. For
examples on CMS please contact me and I will send to you [email protected]
 Technical Data Base – We discovered that one major reason why planners do not plan,
is that they have to spend too much time searching for parts and technical information
because our Technical Data Base is not updated. Actions: Make sure computer system
tags where parts are used for every withdrawal from store. Assign work orders to each
craftsperson to update ten pieces of equipment in their domains every quarter.
 Planning and Scheduling – We discovered that we schedule poorly on a weekly and
Daily basis and we do not plan at all because we are too reactive. Actions: Agree on
guidelines for priorities and implement them. (There are only two priorities Do it now
16
 or latest date to complete work) Call me if you want an example [email protected]
Agree on definitions on “Break- In” work and track by area and individual. Agree on
cut off times for weekly, Daily, Shut Down and Outage schedules, track, record and
follow up on “Break-In” jobs. Again call me if you want examples.

What I have described above are of course just examples on initial improvement initiatives for
the first three months, but if you do these very basic things well you will see results and you
will be ready for next steps.

Step IV Root Cause Problem Elimination can always be done before you do anything else, but
if you want to institute this process to become a part of daily work and thus changing your
organization to a thinking and continuously improving organization, you need to do step III
very well otherwise you will not have time to do any true Root Cause Problem Elimination.

In the January 2004 column I will discuss this next step.

C. Maintainability and Design for Reliability

LCC Life Cycle Cost

Many reliability and maintenance improvement initiatives are successful, but most do not
deliver the results that are possible to reach. I have observed that the rate of success is higher
in many other countries than USA. Some common denominators I have observed in very
successful organizations include;

 They are long term focused.

17
  They have stuck to the concepts they believe in for a long period of time.
 They have a constancy of leadership.
 Their beliefs and missions are well documented and communicated.
 People changes in plant leadership do not change their beliefs.
 They execute what they believe in.

In a discussion many years ago with the president of a European manufacturer of stainless
steel, he told me that Scandinavian pulp mills use five times more stainless steel in their
designs then we do in USA. To me it explains the difference in mindset, we are short term
focused in USA, and many other countries are more long term focused. This can be driven by
taxation rules, climate and other factors.

The concept of Life Cycle Cost (LCC) is not well practiced in many organizations because we
are driven by shortsightedness and a focus on short term cost reductions instead of a focus on
what drives cost. For example a good preventive maintenance program drives down cost, but
it costs money to implement and run. Good returns are produced within a year, but break-
through results are seen after three to five years. At that time the same management team that
took the cost to implement has moved and can not claim the results.
Selection of equipment based on Life Cycle Cost is another example. The right equipment
might cost more, but cost of ownership is lower.

The graph below illustrates this.

The green line illustrates that at the point when 50% of the project phase is used, 5% of cost
has been used and decisions that impact 80% of future cost of ownership has been taken. At
that point in time equipment and system design is specified and procurement starts with
requests for proposals. Much of this has to do with equipment, material, process design etc.
Here I like to take an example on technical documentation, which is very important for cost of
ownership. If a specification is developed to include all original parts, material, corrective
and preventive maintenance descriptions (with pictures), trouble shooting and root cause
diagram etc is documented and part of requests for proposals we can assume the cost of
developing this document is 1 if done early in project. If done later the cost is 10. If done
when contract is signed as an add on to specifications, the cost escalates to 100 and if it is not
done at all the cost to do it five years later will be 1000. If you find that equipment is not
performing as expected, modifications can be done to extend technical life and this is also
18
very expensive compared to doing it in the specification phase.
To include maintainability and reliability designs early in the project can be a very good
investment.

Why is this not done in majority of organizations? The project manager is driven by budget
and time. Someone else will take future costs of ownership. This can be changed, but then we
must think long term and reward long term actions.

D. Operations + Maintenance
Operations + Maintenance = Production (part 1)
In this and following columns, I will elaborate concerning the vital relationship between
operations, maintenance, and engineering. In this first column, I will focus on the relationship
between operations and maintenance. I have written about this before, but the question has
come up very frequently in the last year, so it is worth repeating some of the information.

From my experience, it is more common than not to find that the working relationship
between operations and maintenance is one of adversity instead of a relationship of close and
productive cooperation. Operations often sees itself as the customer of maintenance, and,
consequently, maintenance is viewed as a service provider.
In such a relationship, it should be obvious that operations is responsible for the cost of the
maintenance work it requests and gets delivered. However, in a bad relationship, this is not
the case. As long as maintenance work requests are performed, operations views maintenance
as the good guys. But, if at the end of the year it shows that the maintenance budget is
exceeded, it is not unusual to find the maintenance manager in the hot seat having to explain
why more money than budgeted was spent.

In a customer/service-supplier relationship, it is also common to find that priorities are very

emotional. The customer wants something done and the service supplier says “yes, sir” and
does its best to deliver. This is often done even if the service supplier knows that there is more
important work to do instead of the work it was requested to do. I could go on with many
other issues that result from this type of relationship, including lack of trust, poor
communication, and finger pointing when problems occur, etc. However, I will instead focus
on what you should do to improve this relationship.

AGREE ON THE SAME GOAL. Ask yourself what the business of maintenance is and what
the business of operations is. We could have a lengthy discussion around this, but common
sense dictates one conclusion: If you manufacture pulp or paper, your common goal must be
that both departments are equal partners in manufacturing your product in the most cost
effective manner. This soon comes down to the following formula:

Time Efficiency x Quality Performance x Speed Performance, which is often called Overall
Equipment Efficiency (OEE)

However, I suggest you change the name to Overall Production Efficiency (OPE). Why?
Because you need to express clearly that both departments do have one and the same goal.
You will no longer talk about lost production by departments in a finger-pointing manner.

19
Instead, your focus should be root cause problem elimination. This is an important change,
since it is not enough to just say, “Okay, from now on we are partners instead of
customer/suppliers.” Next, you make friends and do some teamwork training, etc.

You must also change the way your processes work. To change from OEE to OPE means that
you also must abandon the practice of categorizing lost production by department—for
example, by mechanical, electrical, instrumentation, and operations. If you still do your
production reports this way (which 95% of the industry in fact does), you break a ground rule
when you try to get people to work together by asking “who?” instead of “why?”.

I suggest you instead implement the following process:

1. Collect problems that have caused high costs in safety, environmental, lost production
(quality, time, speed), or problems causing high maintenance costs.
2. Select which problem(s) to solve.
3. Assign a problem owner to the selected problem.
4. Problem owner selects a team to help solve the problem.
5. Solve the problem.
6. Document the solution.
7. Educate the rest of the organization in the solution.

If you truly did more of the above, instead of wasting energy and time on guessing which
department is to blame, you would have started autonomous education and training. You will
also remove one of the barriers that keep you from working better together. Soon, you will
also see that problems are not always classifiable by department, because the root cause to the
problem is often a mix of how you operate the equipment and/or the process and how you
maintain it.

Operations + Maintenance = Production (part 2)

In the last column, I discussed joint goals and how to promote the operations/maintenance
partnership through a different way of reporting and solving operations problems, as well as
maintenance ones. In this and in the December article, I will continue to elaborate around the
vital relationship between operations, maintenance, and engineering.

ESTABLISH THE RIGHT FOCUS. If you agree with the ideas presented in the August
column—that the relationship between operations and maintenance should be a partnership,
not a customer/supplier relationship—the next step in promoting this partnership is to
establish the right focus in your joint improvement effort.

So, if maintenance is not a service provider, what does maintenance deliver? I think that both
maintenance and operations deliver reliability. The maintenance department delivers
equipment reliability and the operations department delivers process reliability.

Reliability can be defined as “Quality production output at expected speed without downtime,
personal injuries, or environmental damages,” or the same as OPE or overall production
efficiency (see August column). It can be measured as OPE or with the following formula:
MTBPL/MPL, where MTBPL = mean time between production loss and MPL = mean
production loss. The term “production loss” is suggested rather than the more common
reliability term “MTBF” (mean time between failures). The reason for this is that you should
stress the fact that you want to avoid operational problems, as well as equipment problems.
20
The term “failure” is too often related to technical equipment failures (maintenance).

If you have decided to focus your improvement efforts on reliability improvements that will
result in sustainable, lower maintenance costs, I advise you to find out the revenue of
increased reliability as it compares to the value of reducing maintenance costs. A common
way of doing this is to estimate the average market price for a product or a product mix over
the last five years. Then, deduct the variable cost to make the product over the same time
period. For example: a pulp mill received an average market price of $700/ton for its product
mix. The variable cost to make a ton was $340. The financial contribution the mill will
receive for each ton made and sold is consequently $360 per ton.

As shown in the graph, your joint goal is to continuously increase MTBPL and decrease
MPL. The combined results of this will be a reliability factor of, for example, 50.4. Your joint
operations/maintenance goal is to continuously increase this factor.

The next thing you need to do is to identify the bottleneck of the process line making the
product and the OPE of this process. If the bottleneck is the bleach plant and the OPE there is
84%, the potential opportunity to increase OPE is most probably in the area of 6% to 10 %.
Assuming that the pulp dryer machines and baling lines can handle the increase in production
and your present throughput is 500,000 tpy, the value of a 5% increase in production
throughput is worth 25,000 tons x $360 = $9,000,000/year. The maintenance cost for this pulp
mill is $87/ton or a total of $43,500,000/year. A 5% reduction in maintenance costs would be
worth $2,175,000/year, or 24% of the value of increased and sold production.

In this example, it should be obvious that your joint operations/maintenance focus should be
reliability. A lower maintenance cost will then follow as your reliability increases. The
problem is that your boss might ask you to do both at the same time, or even worse, ask you
to first cut the maintenance cost and then focus on reliability. My experience has shown over
and over again that this approach will fail.

My next column will appear in the December 2000 issue of Pulp & Paper.

Operations + Maintenance = Production (part 3)

in the previous two columns, I discussed joint goals and how to promote the
operations/maintenance partnership through a different way of reporting and solving
operations as well as maintenance problems. In this article, I will continue to elaborate on the
vital relationship between operations, maintenance, and engineering.

A JOINT VENTURE. One thing is to agree to that operations and maintenance are equal
partners in a joint venture resulting in reliable production. Another thing is to make it happen,
and, to make it happen, you need to do things differently than you have done in a customer-
supplier relationship. For example, you should:

21
  Agree on the same goal-overall production efficiency (OPE).
 Achieve the right joint focus-total reliability. There is revenue as a result of improved
reliability. Improved reliability results in lower sustainable maintenance costs.
 Solve problems-do not classify production losses by department.
 All of the above were explained in the August and October columns. Other things you
can do to promote the partnership are:
 Include operators in basic inspections and essential care of equipment
 Agree on guidelines for priorities of work requests
 Communicate production plans
 Create a joint shutdown schedule

Of course, the most important part of building the partnership is personal relationships.
However, organizations are changing, and, with the wrong processes in place to promote a
partnership, things will fall back to a less effective work system.

INCLUDE OPERATORS. Where it is practical and makes sense, operators should undertake
some basic inspections of equipment. If it is practical for an operator to do inspections, they
should be taught to do so. As a guideline-if an operator can be trained in an inspection method
in less than 15 minutes, he or she should be trained to do that inspection.

A classic example is the inspection of a rotary steam joint for a paper machine. It makes sense
for a back tender to not only look at ropes, felts, paper web, doctor blades, condensate
returning through steam joint, etc., on the back side of a paper machine, but to also inspect the
condition of the carbon ring in the steam joint. Training operators on how to do this takes less
than five minutes.

As can be seen in the picture, a pin on the side of the joint

housing is indicating the wear of the carbon ring inside the
joint. Where there is less than a 1/8-in. distance between the
housing and the locker ring on the pin, the carbon ring needs to
be replaced in the next shutdown. With a good light source, an
operator can check about five joints in each direction when he
or she is doing other operations inspections on the backside of
the paper machine.

This is a very good and reliable inspection and it is only one

example out of many that are logical to train operators to
perform. By the way, you might be surprised to know that
many very experienced paper makers have never heard of this
basic inspection method; they still run joints until they leak and cost 300% to 800% more to
repair.

AGREE ON WORK REQUEST PRIORITIES. First of all, maintenance work should start
with a work request, not a work order. A work request might or might not turn into a work
order.

If a work request turns into a work order, the execution should follow jointly agreed upon
priorities. It is a very good idea to develop these together between operations and
maintenance.

22
To sit down with your operations partner and agree on these guidelines and then start using
them jointly is one of the most hands-on and best ways of making the partnership happen. I
will be glad to send anybody who requests it an example of a priority guideline.

Operations + Maintenance = Production (part 4)

In the previous columns, I discussed joint goals and how to promote the vitally important
operations/maintenance partnership through a different way of reporting and solving
operations, as well as maintenance, problems. In this article, I will continue to elaborate on
the very important relationship between operations, maintenance, and engineering.

PROMOTING PARTNERSHIPS. To make a partnership between maintenance and

operations successful, you need to do things differently than you have done in a customer-
supplier relationship. For example, you should:

 Agree on the same goal-overall production efficiency (OPE).

 Achieve the right joint focus-total reliability. There is revenue as a result of improved
reliability. Improved reliability results in lower sustainable maintenance costs.
 Solve problems-do not classify production losses by department.
 Include operators in basic inspections and essential care of equipment.
 Agree on guidelines for priorities of work requests. If you want a copy of this, please
contact me by email.

All of the above were explained in my previous three columns on this topic. In the four
following sections, this column focuses on other things you can do to promote the partnership.

COMMUNICATE PRODUCTION PLANS. It might seem obvious that communicating

production plans is done no less often than in your weekly Thursday meeting between the
operations and maintenance partners. However, my experience is that it is not a given that
maintenance and operations communicate the production plan well enough.

As a minimum requirement, the production plan is posted weekly and updated daily. This
allows scheduling of maintenance work to best take advantage of all opportunities that present
themselves. This is important for a pro-cess producing many different sheet characteristics,
such as a paperboard machine making everything from uncoated to coated on one or both
sides, running one or more wires. It is also important in other processes. For example, if you
make one type of pulp in a continuous digester, you will have fewer maintenance
opportunities on short notice.

IDENTIFY MAINTENANCE OPPORTUNITIES. Sit down with your operations partner and
identify all maintenance opportunities that present themselves as you go through each product
you manufacture. Also, estimate a time range available for maintenance work. Give each
maintenance opportunity a code and describe them on the backside of the priority guideline
(see December 2000 column).

In your work requests, the requestors should fill out the maintenance opportunity as a
minimum requirement per your standard for "work re-quests." The value of doing this is that
you will learn more about the manufacturing process, while at the same time promoting the
23
partnership and opening up more opportunities to do maintenance without losing production.
You will start taking advantage of all scheduled and unscheduled shutdowns to do necessary
maintenance work.

JOINT SHUTDOWN SCHEDULE. It is not uncommon to find that there are four to five
shutdown schedules, and these schedules are not well connected to each other. There might be
one schedule for operations work, another for mechanical work, etc. An indication of a good
partnership between operations and maintenance-and also within maintenance-is that there is
only one schedule for every shutdown. This schedule should be well connected between all
involved departments.

OPERATING PRACTICES / MAINTENANCE PREVENTION. Include operating practices

in your maintenance prevention program. When you do the priority guideline jointly with
operations, you will most probably discuss one event called "critical process running on spare
equipment." This is when, for example, you run a spare pump because the redundant pump is
not performing. This event often triggers a long discussion. Operations has always called
maintenance resources to repair the failed pump, even if it is two o'clock in the morning.
The solution is that switching pumps between shutdowns becomes the responsibility of
operations. All doubled pumps are marked "A" and "B," so it is easy to remember which
pumps to run. (It is not unusual to find that both pumps are unknowingly running and working
against each other). There are many other operating procedures you should include in your
maintenance prevention program. Examples include how to heat up a steam system, how to
start a pump correctly, and how to clean without causing problems.

Operations + Maintenance = Production (part 5)

In the previous columns, I discussed how to promote the vitally important
operations/maintenance partnership. To find those columns, visit www.paperloop.com and
look for back issues of Pulp & Paper.

This is the last in my series of columns covering the operations/maintenance partnership, and
it ends where it is more common to start a series like this‹with the vision and mission
statements.

VISION AND MISSION STATEMENTS.

As most of us know, vision and mission statements do not always exist, and, if they do exist,
they are seldom well-communicated or understood. Not long ago, I sat in a meeting to discuss
these statements with a group of operations and maintenance managers from a large
international company, along with their vice president of manufacturing. After presenting the
many different statements used in different plants, it all became very confusing. "Do we all
understand the difference between vision and mission?" a frustrated manager asked. It showed
that most people in the meeting could not clearly define the difference, yet they all had
documented statements.

To make a long story short, it was decided that a vision statement should explain what the
organization would like to become or where the organization would like to be in the future.
On the other hand, a mission statement should explain the purpose of the organization¹s
existence. It was also determined that these statements would be decided on a corporate level
as a decree. How each organization accomplished the mission was left up to that organization.

A long discussion followed on the different roles of production and maintenance, and, at the
24
end, it was determined that production is a partnership not an internal customer relationship
and this must be reflected in the vision and mission statements. Nomenclature therefore
needed changing so that production became the common denominator for operations and
maintenance.

If you read the previous columns, and agreed to the approach, the following should be easy to
agree on:

 The result of maintenance work is equipment reliability (and preservation/prolonging

life of assets).
 The result of operations work is process reliability.
 Together, the result is production reliability.

Consequently, in our meeting, the mission statement for maintenance was agreed to read as,
"To deliver cost-effective equipment reliability," and, for operations, "To deliver cost-
effective process reliability." The term cost-effective means that the cost to accomplish a
result must be less than the value the result is expected to deliver in comparison with other
investment alternatives. The joint mission statement was decided upon as, "Operations and
maintenance shall together deliver cost-effective production reliability."

CURRENT BEST PRACTICES DOCUMENT.

The vision statement for maintenance is built on what we call current best practices (CBP).
Each key process in reliability and maintenance is identified and documented, for example:
Leadership and Organization; Planning and Scheduling; Preventive Maintenance; Technical
Database; Stores Management; Root Cause Problem Elimination; and so forth. Each of these
key processes is broken down into sub-processes. For example, within the key process of
Planning and Scheduling is the sub-process of Work Request. This sub-process contains
elements such as Scope of Work Defined, Equipment Number Defined, and so forth.

The CBP document forms the basis for evaluating the gap between how good an organization
is and how good it could be. Based on the agreed upon CBP document, the following vision
statement was adopted during our meeting:

 Achieve an average of 80* for all CBP elements by the year 2005

On a scale of 100
I can assure you that this is an aggressive vision; I have never done an audit that has resulted
in higher than 55 on this scale. Achieving the vision will result in increased reliability and,
consequently, lower maintenance costs, but it can only be accomplished in a partnership with
operations and engineering.

E. Preventive Maintenance
Checking Best Practices for Preventive Maintenance
Torbjörn Idhammar VP and Partner, IDCON, Inc., a maintenance
management consulting and training company.

25
Further information is available by contacting [email protected]

Example best practices and the questions you need to ask to determine if your plant is using
them.

Visiting plants in different corners of the world, we often are asked: “What are the current
best practices for preventive maintenance (PM)?” We usually answer that we define
preventive maintenance using 95 key elements. We also point out, to some people’s dismay,
that there is no single silver bullet for improving PM, but rather many combined efforts will
be required to eventually yield results.

Here are a few key elements that have been extracted from our program of Current Best
Practices (CBP) along with test questions and best practice (BP) examples to help you gauge
how well your plant practices measure up.

Do you have a definition for preventive maintenance?

Interview test: Ask people in maintenance and operations to define what is included in
preventive maintenance.
BP example: We have a definition of preventive maintenance that is documented, understood,
and well communicated across our plant.

Having a definition of preventive maintenance is important for good communication in

meetings, improvement efforts, and training seminars. For example, are detailed cleaning,
balancing, and alignment part of preventive maintenance? Is operator inspection part of PM?
Are operating practices part of PM?

We have often attended meetings or interviews where we are told a plant is continuously
working on improving preventive maintenance. When we ask for the plant’s definition of PM,
we notice that there are as many definitions of PM as there are people. How can we expect to
improve PM if we are not clear on what PM really is? We define PM as essential care and
condition monitoring (PM/ECCM) as shown in Fig. 1. Perhaps you can use the definition in
your plant.

Do you know how satisfactory PM is done today?

Test: Ask the plant manager, maintenance manager, and operations manager for the PM
improvement plan. If there is one, is it specific with timelines? For example: “Lubrication
storage improvement complete by September 2003.”
BP: Plant management is aware of strengths and weaknesses of the PM program. The plant
therefore has specific plans and timelines in place for improvement actions.

The experience of Ian Farrell, maintenance manager at UPM-Kymmene in Scotland,

illustrates the awareness factor. Farrell, whose company has deployed the CBP education and
training assessment in several plants in the United Kingdom, expressed the experience of
interviewing people in the plants in a presentation at a recent maintenance conference.

“ We interviewed people in the plants to get a good idea of how well PM is done. When
initially asking a person how well PM is done in the plant, the first answer is ‘Yes, we do this
26
all the time.’ After some more discussion and specific questions around PM, the interviewee
changes the statement to ‘Well, we probably do this most of the time.’ After more small talk
and several cups of coffee and more explanations around PM the interviewee states, ‘I know
we definitely, sometimes do it.’

“ The questions become more specific and the interviewee downgrades the statement to ‘I
think we do it.’ Time passes and questions around, for example, alignment standards,
condition monitoring routes, and operator involvement make the interviewee think of what
good PM really is, and the statement is changed to ‘Somebody told me we did it.’ When we
finally have defined what best practices in preventive maintenance are and there is a stack of
coffee mugs, the person muses, ‘We used to do it all the time.’”

By first defining what PM is, and then educating and training people in the current state of
their actual PM performance, the groundwork for improvement is laid.

Do you have an alignment standard, and is it followed?

Test: Ask for an alignment standard and check quality of standard. Go look at equipment for
signs of good or poor alignment.
BP: There is a well-documented alignment standard. More importantly, the standard is
followed.

In a world-class reliability and maintenance organization, all alignments are done to 0.002 in.
(0.05 mm) for equipment running below 3600 rpm and 0.001 in. (0.025 mm) for equipment
running above 3600 rpm. There is a well-defined alignment standard explaining how to set
up, clean, check for pipe strain, check for soft foot, etc.

Take a tour of your plant. If alignment is done well there are jacking bolts (push bolts)
installed on all motors, gears, and other equipment of significance. Bases and foundations are
in good condition and no more than four shims are used under the motor feet (Fig. 2). Overall
vibration level is low in the plant (0.1 in./sec unfiltered average). As a tracking indicator, see
if alignment records are kept for each alignment job.

Do you have a lubrication standard, and it is followed?

Test: The standard should include storage, handling, filtering, and cleanliness of lubricants.
Visually check cleanliness of storage areas and handling.
BP: There is a well-documented lubrication standard. More importantly, the standard is
followed.

The cleanliness standard for each piece of equipment should match the clearances in the
equipment’s lubricated surfaces. For example, a hydraulic unit may need to be filtered down
to 3 microns (200 beta) and a gearbox to 12 microns (75 beta).

In order to reach the right cleanliness levels of lubricants, oil and grease have to be stored,
handled, and filtered correctly. Few people know that new oil usually is delivered at around
40 microns cleanliness level, which means that oil going into equipment with fine clearances
should be filtered.

Are inspections (condition monitoring) done where it is cost effective to do so?

Test: Go through inspection lists, check for level of detail, and make sure the route is actually
completed.

27
BP: There are inspection routes for all mechanical, electrical, and instrumentation equipment
(where it is cost effective to have inspections).

In a top-notch plant, inspections are documented and completed according to schedule. The
plant is using an inspection list or, even better, a handheld computer. The list or handheld
computer describes exactly what to do for each inspection. The inspections are a combination
of measuring condition and subjective (look, listen, feel, smell) inspections.

Most inspections are completed while equipment is operating because we do not want to
waste valuable shutdown/offline time on inspections that could be done on the run.
Inspections can usually be done better when equipment is operating. For example, a pump
cannot really be inspected well when it is down since there are no vibration, no operating
pressures, and no seal water flow.

To see if your plant is performing according to world-class reliability and maintenance

standards, take an inspection list, or handheld computer (if you do not have inspection lists, it
is time to develop them), and walk the route. For example, check the following:

 Do we have condition monitoring routes covering all necessary inspections?

 Do we use simple inspection tools such as a stroboscope, infrared thermometer,
vibration pen, industrial stethoscope, bright flashlights (500,000 candela), and
inspection mirrors?
 Can we inspect couplings, belts, and chains on the run, or do guards make it
impossible (Fig. 3)?
 Are inspections being done? Are oil glasses clean enough to see oil levels, are base
bolts clean enough to check tightness,etc.?
 Are people educated and trained in basic inspection techniques?

Is detailed cleaning of equipment done well?

Test: Take a walk in your plant and visually check the cleanliness and condition of the
equipment.
BP: Detailed cleaning of equipment is done consistently. Dirty areas are redesigned in order
to protect equipment from contamination.

Detailed cleaning can be checked easily. For example, a clean hydraulic unit can be inspected
for leaks in about 10 sec by taking a quick look at the pan underneath the unit (Fig. 4). A dirty
hydraulic unit would take 20-30 min to check for leaks.

Is an ultrasonic or vibration monitor used when greasing bearings?

Test: Check lubricator’s equipment.
BP: Vibration or ultrasonic levels (or other method) are checked while greasing in order to
apply the correct amount of grease.

Greasing is done by measuring ultrasonic or vibration levels while applying grease to the
bearing. It is almost impossible to know how much grease is applied to a bearing without a
measurement. The measurement tools indicate to us when the grease hits the bearings and
monitor the vibration or ultrasonic levels as grease is squeezed into the bearing. Over and
under greasing can be avoided by using the right tools. An alternate method is to use a volume
meter, assuming the required grease volume for the bearing is known.

28
Although just a sample of the 95 points we use to evaluate plant performance, these example
tests and best practices demonstrate the methodology by which one can build a system for
discussing performance levels.

Tor Idhammar is partner and vice president of IDCON, Inc., reliability and maintenance
consultants, 7200 Falls of Neuse Rd., Suite 200, Raleigh, NC 27615-5384; telephone (919)
847-8764

Preventive Maintenance/Essential Care and Condition Monitoring

Fig. 1. Essential Care (EC) includes preventing failure from occurring, with tasks such as
detailed cleaning, lubrication, alignment, balancing, operating procedures, adjustments, and
installation procedures. Fixed Time Maintenance (FTM) is all replacements that are done on
a fixed schedule regardless of condition, e.g., programmed replacements and overhauls.
Condition monitoring (CM) is all inspections from simple subjective look, listen, feel, smell
inspections done by operators or crafts people to objective vibration analysis, oil sampling,
ultrasonic leak detection, pressure checks, current readings, etc.
back to article

Fig. 2. Left: A motor has not been aligned properly. We can clearly see the beat marks from
the sledgehammer, the motor is missing push bolts, and there are too many shims under the
feet. Right: A motor with the correct set up to enable good alignment.
back to article

29
Fig. 3. This equipment guard allows for on-the-run visual inspection.
back to article

Fig. 4. The hydraulic unit on the left would take 20-30 min to inspect and identify leaks, while
the hydraulic unit on the right can be inspected for leaks in about 10 sec by looking for oil in
the pan underneath the unit.

Practical Condition Monitoring

This article series explores sample business processes that need to be implemented in order to
improve overall plant reliability. In parts one and two, equipment life-extending activities
were detailed. This article will touch on elements of condition monitoring.

Condition monitoring (CM) is not a life-extending activity. Life-extending activities are

things such as lubrication, alignment, balancing and operating procedures. It's very important
to keep this very basic fact clear in all communications within your plant; otherwise, too little
importance may be placed on the planning and scheduling of corrective work orders
originated in CM.

CM only provides information on failures before there is a breakdown. You can do it with
inspection tools - vibration monitors, infrared temperature guns, pressure gauges, volt meters

30
and others. You can also execute CM subjectively by looking, listening, feeling and smelling
(let's avoid tasting, shall we?).

This article is dedicated to the somewhat lost skill of subjective (look, listen, feel, smell)
inspections.

These days, we tend to rely more and more on technology. Computers are great, but they can
be awfully bad at interpreting machine condition. For example, how do we get a computer to:

 find a loose bolt for a reasonable cost before there is mechanical looseness?
 see dirt buildup on an electrical motor before heat increases?
 find a recently plugged breather on a gearbox?
 find the location of a leak in a pneumatic system?
 pinpoint a problem with a photocell that is knocked out of alignment?

These problems could somehow be found accurately with a computer, but a properly trained
person would only need about 10 seconds to see the problems.

How well is your plant doing with mechanical, instrumentation and electrical inspections?
While articles often talk about the management systems needed, I'd like to list some basic
examples in order to rediscover the subjective inspection methods.

Regardless of whether you're doing inspections with handheld computers or a paper system,
can trend data or not, or have key performance indicators or not, you won't be successful
unless your people can do quality inspections on equipment. Here are the examples:

Example 1: AC motor temperature

If your inspectors look at motor temperature, do they take the time to think about the
significance of a hot temperature on the coupling side of the motor vs. a hot temperature at the
center of the motor? A hot temperature in the center often means a damaged winding or an
overload situation, while a hot temperature at the coupling side of the motor means a bearing
problem of some kind.

Example 2: Couplings

Are couplings and the equipment attached to the coupling operated to breakdown mode, or are
problems found before a breakdown occurs? All
couplings that can cause a breakdown costing
more than a few hundred dollars should have an
inspection lid so the coupling element, bolts and
keyways can be checked easily. (The cost of
inspection would be, at maximum, $100 per
year.) Preferably, the inspection should be done
with a stroboscope while the equipment is
running (see Figure 1).

Figure 1. A coupling can be inspected on-the-

run

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with a stroboscope. Note that this plant has
followed OSHA 1942 regulations for guard safety.

Example 3: Heat exchanger sacrificial anode

The basic function of a sacrificial anode is to protect surrounding material. A common use is
to place a plug in a heat exchanger's cast iron shell (Figure 3). The anode is usually made of
zinc and will slowly corrode instead of the iron shell. The phenomenon is called galvanic
corrosion. How would you inspect the zinc plug before it starts to leak in a critical
application? Drill a small hole to a shallow depth in the center of the zinc plug. A small leak
will be visible in the center of the plug well before it is time to change it.

Figure 3. Inspections of zinc anodes in a heat exchanger are simplified

by drilling a small hole. When the anode wears away, a small leak
will develop so that the need for replacement can be detected earlier.

Example 4: Pump packing

Pump packing replacements turn into emergencies in some plants because the wrong mind-set
is in play. If it doesn't leak more than the recommended one to two drops per second, it's
usually not examined. Why not change the mind-set? Make sure packing is changed when
there is only one-eighth of an inch of takeup left in the packing (Figure 2)?
32
 Figure 2. Change the pump packing when there is
one-eighth of an inch of takeup left in the packing.

The Numbers

IDCON recently collected information on how work requests were initiated in a large process
plant. We collected all work requests over seven months and analyzed how the work was
found. The data showed that close to 70 percent of all problems found from CM were picked
up subjectively by operators and mechanics through detailed look, listen, feel and smell
inspections.

Many problems wouldn't have been found if it wasn't for vibration analysis, infrared
technology and oil analysis. But the data makes you wonder if we don't underutilize
subjective inspections. They are a very powerful and cost-effective maintenance tool.

Preventing failures and extending life

In the previous three issues of Reliable Plant, my columns touched upon

defining best practices in order for leadership to clearly communicate the plant’s direction for
reliability improvements. In the next few issues, I’ll pick a few of our best practices and ask
you to check your own plant in order to rate the performance.

IDCON’s “Current Best Practices” include nearly 300 elements. We normally use this
document to assess plant reliability performance. I’ve picked a few best practices from this
document for this articles series. The equipment life cycle starts with specification, design and
engineering of equipment and production systems. This leads us to an important issue, life-
cycle cost.

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Check 1: Life-cycle cost (LCC)
Specify, design and buy assets based on LCC instead of just the cost of purchasing equipment.
LCC means that the total cost to buy and own an asset is considered, not just the purchase
price.

Design for reliability: Pump inlet should have 10 times the

diameter of straight pipe to avoid turbulence and cavitation.

Operations, maintenance and engineering must work in a close partnership in the early stages
of a new installation project in order to establish a good LCC process. Typical good results
are equipment designs that are easy to maintain and are reliable, and equipment that easily can
be monitored for condition.

For example, in a plant with a reasonably good LCC process, there would be 10 times the
diameter of straight pipe to the inlet of single-sided centrifugal pumps in order to avoid
turbulence and cavitation. Tank entry ports would have hinges for quick and safe entry instead
of a traditional tank entry that requires lifting devices and two people to open it. The design
also would have as few bolts as possible to reduce wrench time.

Other examples would be installation of oil sampling ports on all pertinent oil reservoirs.
Gauges would have operating ranges marked in order to quickly check the current reading.
Jacking bolts (push bolts) would be installed on motors and gearboxes for accurate alignment.

Most plants have hundreds of examples where it’s obvious engineers haven’t worked closely
with maintenance and operations. The problem’s root is often that engineers are recognized
by management for completing projects on time and under budget. Therefore, engineers have
no incentives to consider LCC.

Check 2: Alignment

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Most plants have the basic requirement for good alignment. They have tools and training. The
question is, can we assume alignment is done well because the basics are in place?

Many plants I visit have an issue with getting the time to do a good alignment job, and/or
don’t have the correct design, and/or don’t maintain bases and foundations to enable good
alignments. In some cases, standards (such as heat checking and avoidance of pipe strain)
aren’t followed.

Walk around your plant and estimate your alignment by checking for: poor foundations,
equipment without jacking bolts, motors with beat marks from sledgehammers, shim packs
larger than four, bolt-bound equipment/undercut bolts and hot bearings. All of these are
possible signs of poor alignment.

Design for maintainability: The tank entry port to the left has many bolts and no
hinge. The wrench time is cut drastically by adding a hinge and allowing fewer
bolts in the design (bottom)

Preventing Failures and Extending life – part 2

This article series discusses sample business processes that must be implemented in order to
improve overall plant reliability. This article and the previous one focus on preventing
failures and extending equipment life. The series will continue in upcoming issues with topics
such as spare parts management, condition monitoring, planning and scheduling, and root
cause problem elimination.

If you ask any maintenance department how failures can best be prevented, the No. 1 answer
is usually that the operations department needs to stop wrecking equipment. If you ask
operations how reliability can be improved, the top answer is almost always for maintenance
people to work instead of sitting idle.

We know that maintenance people are idle because effective work processes such as planning,
scheduling and spare parts management aren’t defined and/or well-instituted. But in this
article, I’d like to discuss operating practices with regard to reliability.

35
Operating practices are a vital part of any preventive maintenance process. Good practices
prevent failures. Poor practices encourage failures.

A plant worker changes the

pressure setting on a cylinder.

The cylinder dead-heads and shakes

loose or gets damaged due to the
wrong pressure setting.

Some good questions for the management team are: “Do we have well-documented and
communicated expectations in our standard operating practices (SOPs)?” “Do the SOPs cover
equipment reliability issues?” “Does maintenance provide adequate input into how equipment
should be operated to avoid problems?” “Are operators trained in SOPs?” “Does operations
management have the skills to understand reliability issues in an operating context?”

It’s common to see SOPs in plants, but do they include equipment reliability issues? A few
examples follow.

Pneumatic cylinder: At one plant that I worked in, it was common to see operators increase
the pressure setting on the pneumatic cylinder as much as 100 percent in order to get the
equipment to run faster. When the cylinder exceeded twice its designed speed, it “dead-
headed” and usually shook loose or bent the rod. As a result, maintenance changed the
pressure setting during the area’s weekly PM. In talking to the operators, they can’t remember
ever being told not to change the pressure setting. Air pressure settings weren’t part of the
operator training. SOPs for the equipment didn’t exist.

Motor start-up: When you push the start button of an AC motor, the current surge through
the motor is usually four to seven times the 100 percent load. If the start button is pushed
several times in a short time interval, it’s common to damage or burn the motor windings. Do
your operators know this fact and operate equipment accordingly?

36
Steam systems: An operating procedure as simple as opening a valve too fast can have
devastating consequences for a piping system. The phenomenon is called water hammer.
Here, steam enters a cold piping system and condenses into water. The water travels with
great speed and causes damage to pipes and flanges as it travels through the system. Piping
elbows are especially vulnerable. This is a common problem in many industries.

Open communication between operations, maintenance and engineering is needed during the
design and selection phase of equipment. That communication must continue after
installation.

I’ve seen great results by having operations and maintenance do inspections routes and PM
tasks together at least once a week. They should also jointly report findings to supervision.

Preventive Maintenance Optimization

For decades, many “experts” have used the graph in Figure 1 to discuss the optimum level of
maintenance. This Figure is based on an old-fashioned, yet widespread approach that bases
preventive maintenance on Fixed Time Maintenance (FTM) replacements and overhauls of
components. This approach is seldom justifiable because only 15% to 20% of all components
fail after a predictable time.
As the graph shows, the more this type of maintenance is performed, the larger the cost for
preventive maintenance becomes. Concurrently, the cost for corrective maintenance is
supposed to go down. The cost for production losses is believed to go down to a point where
you need to shut down equipment more frequently for preventive maintenance, and, as a
result, the cost of lost production starts increasing.
The top total curve in Figure 1 is the sum of the other curves and shows what the optimum
level of maintenance should be.

THE RIGHT APPROACH. A modern and cost-effective approach to preventive maintenance

shows that there is no maintenance cost optimum. Instead, maintenance costs will decrease at
the same time as costs for production losses also decrease. This approach can be summarized
as follows.

No preventive maintenance action is performed unless proven to be less costly then the
failure. A simple consequence of failure analysis (CFA) is made to justify preventive
maintenance activities.
Preventive maintenance activities are primarily condition-based. The condition of a
component, measured when the equipment is in operation, governs planned and scheduled
corrective maintenance. It is acceptable to operate a component to breakdown when it is the
most cost-effective maintenance procedure. A standard corrective maintenance procedure
should be developed and documented.
Define the need for corrective maintenance early on (Condition Monitoring) as a part of
preventive maintenance. Correcting the problem is defined as planned and scheduled
maintenance.
37
Practicing this maintenance philosophy will transform the earlier graph to that of Figure 2.
Here, the cost for preventive maintenance is very low, especially if operators are trained and
motivated to do some essential care and inspections. A plant might end up having less than
5% of the traditional work force allocated for preventive maintenance. As with Figure 1, the
top total curve in Figure 2 is the sum of the other curves and shows what the optimum level of
maintenance should be.
With this improved maintenance philosophy, the level of planned and scheduled corrective
maintenance will increase to over 80% and total maintenance volume and costs will go down
20% to 30%.

More significantly, reliability will improve and production throughput will be faster. This
results in lower costs for lost production. And, because preventive maintenance activities are
cost-justified based on failure-developing periods and failure distribution in time, total costs
are continuously decreasing.

Figure 1:Wrong approach to maintenance

Figure 2: Right approach to maintenance

38
CMMS and Preventive Maintenance (part 1)

A very important part of a cost-effective preventive maintenance program is what I call the
route-based activity. These are activities that are easiest to do, and to administer, if they are
presented in a list. This list can be presented in electronic format or in a paper format and
includes such activities as lubrication and inspections by maintenance craftspeople and
equipment operators. There are two major things that surprise me regarding these basic
preventive maintenance activities:

1. With the very good return on investment (ROI) you get from these programs, I am
surprised at how many plants lack these programs or perform them very poorly.
2. All major computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) lack the
capability to administer these routes in an efficient manner.

RETURN ON INVESTMENT. We use cost avoidance analysis as a tool to measure the return
on investment (ROI) from route-based activity programs (exclusive of lubrication). In the last
year we have verified the ROI to be between five to 10 times the initial investment and, after
that, 10 to 30 times the cost to run the program. Even if such a good ROI can be verified, the
inspection program is very poor in most plants and, if one exists, it is not executed with the
highest priority.

Computerized Maintenance Management Systems (CMMS) SHORTCOMINGS. All CMMS

providers we talk with say their systems can produce inspection lists to support inspection and
lubrication routes. We must understand that, in the computer world, the answer is always,
"Yes, our system can do that.” It is never “no.”

The dilemma is that the CMMS provider does not think in terms of route-based activities at
all. Their systems are driven by work orders. If each inspection is given a work order number,
you can do the inspections in a route documented with more than 250 work orders. First of
all, this is impractical for the person doing the inspections, and, secondly, it will require a lot
of time for someone to close all the work orders.

Another way route-based activities are performed in a work order driven CMMS is to give
each route a work order number and describe each inspection in a sub work order. This still
creates complications and administrative time. A third example of how some plants try to
document and administer route-based activities is to give each route a work order number and
have the route documented in a spread sheet. Again, the dilemma is that this method will not
support effective routes and will make it more cumbersome than necessary to change the
content of inspections, transfer tasks to operators, change frequencies, merge mechanical and
electrical inspections, and so forth. All of these activities are frequently done if you have a
good system implemented.

To date, we have only found small CMMS packages that have good inspection programs. The
39
solution is, therefore, to have a standalone system for route-based activities. Even in a time
when it seems like all activities must be integrated into one company-wide system that covers
everything, the best solutions can still be standalone systems. There are very few things—if
any at all—in a route-based system that need to be tied with other activities. Therefore, you
can very well buy a standalone system for this activity. A single-user system that can do this
well is not expensive. The minimum requirements for a good route-based system must allow
you to:

 See all programmed preventive maintenance activities per equipment identification in

one document.
 Change an activity from one craft to another in seconds. (For example, moving a
mechanical inspection to an operator inspection).
 Change a frequency in seconds.
 Change a standard activity in minutes. (For example changing the standard inspection
of gears to a new inspection method, or changing three types of lubricants to a single
new type.)
 Add or delete equipment in minutes.

GOOD INSPECTION PROGRAMS. If you do have a good inspection program implemented,

you should recognize the following indicators:

 All hours for lubrication, mechanical, and electrical and instrumentation preventive
maintenance activities are 6% to 12% of total maintenance hours.
 Most work in shut down and weekly and daily schedules is the result of early problem
detection from preventive maintenance inspections.
 There are no unnecessary duplications of preventive maintenance activities between
mechanical, electrical, lubrication, operators, and so forth.
 The content of the preventive maintenance program is right and you actually perform
100% of programmed preventive maintenance activities.
 Average vibration level continuously decreases

Preventive Maintenance (part 2)

In the first part of this series of columns on Preventive Maintenance (PM) I talked about the
necessity of having a good route based function in your Computerized Maintenance
Management System (CMMS) to support easy administration of route based Preventive
Maintenance activities.
In this column I will comment on some common reasons, as to why your Preventive
Maintenance program might not always work as well as you would like it to work.

Wrong content
If your program does not have the right content, it is not generating the desired results. If your
program has not been thoroughly updated in the last five years, it most probably contains, not
only too much Preventive Maintenance, but also the wrong activities. A good PM program
has 90+% of all PM activities done as inspections while equipment is running and less than
10% are PM activities that require down time to be done.
Classical examples of wrong and excessive PM, are Preventive Maintenance activities on V-
Belt drives and couplings and many other components with a safety guards. Many PM
programs suggest that these components are inspected weekly by maintenance crafts people
and every shift by operators. On top of that a shut down PM is also done every six months.
40
The fact is, that most of the guards are designed in such a way that the components can not be
inspected while equipment is operating, and it does not make sense to inspect something that
can not be seen.
Many guards are big and heavy, so it can take two crafts people several hours to take off
guards, do the inspections and replace the guards during a shut down. Even worse, if they
would find a problem on the component during this inspection and this problem has to be
corrected before start up, then this could lead to a prolonged shut down.

If guards are designed in the right way, the only PM to be done should be inspections on the
run. In a route based inspection program, each of these inspections takes an average of about
three minutes including walking time. If a problem is found during these inspections, a
planned and scheduled corrective maintenance action will be done when the next opportunity
to do so presents itself.
To decide on the right content, you must understand three things.

1. The consequence of a break down of the component.

2. How a failure can be detected.
3. How long before a break down of the component a failure can be detected.

Consequence of a break down

A break down is defined as the point in time when a components function ceases. The
consequence of a break down can be prioritized in following groups.

1. Personal or environmental damage.

2. High costs for production losses or maintenance to correct break down.
3. Preserve value.

As a first step it is a good advise to not go into any elaborate and time consuming evaluation
to find the criticality of equipment. That can be done later. We use the following fast
approach to evaluate criticality:

A. Ask yourself what will happen if this equipment breaks down?

For 90% of equipment the answer is given by reading the name plate of equipment and
understanding the process. If there is a spare equipment. How fast can this spare equipment be
started etc.

B. Ask Operators If we do not know the answer to the first question, we will ask an operator.
That will take care of about another 50% of the remaining questions.

C. Consult process and Instrumentation drawings

If the operator does not know the answer it is bad, but it is also identifying a training
opportunity. Together we will look at a process and instrumentation drawing to learn what
will happen if the equipment breaks down. This will answer most of the remaining of
unanswered questions.

With this screening process you only need to analyze what is important to analyze and you
save more than 90% of time as compared to processes suggested in Reliability Centered
Maintenance and similar programs.

41
Using the same approach as above the next step will be to set up the right PM for each
component (Coupling , valve, cooler etc.) of the equipment. ( E.g. Hydraulic system).

Preventive Maintenance (part 3)

In the previous two articles, I discussed methods for developing a good preventive
maintenance (PM) and condition monitoring program. In this column, I further comment on
reasons why your PM program might not always work as well as you would like it to work.

DOCUMENTATION AND TRAINING. When you select the right PM procedure, you need
to document this procedure. . It is important that you decide on the format for this document,
because it should be used for training of people and to improve the chosen procedure in the
future. Remember that, in this case, we are talking about basic inspection methods, not
predictive maintenance methods such as vibration analysis, wear particle analysis, etc.

In our program, we have chosen to call these procedures condition monitoring standards
(CMS). We use a lot of pictures to describe these procedures, since it is easier and safer to
describe a method with a picture than with words. The document also stands a better chance
of being read and understood if it includes pictures.

At a minimum you need to include what, how, and, especially, why an inspection should be
done. It takes time to develop the condition monitoring standard documents, but remember
that if you have done one, such as for a coupling, this document will be reused for all other
couplings of this type. Frequencies and other values unique to the individual component will
be described in the route list.

I also recommend that you do not use off-the-shelf documents. Developing documents is good
training for teaching the future PM inspectors to document as many condition monitoring
procedures as possible, and it also promotes ownership of the system. For more information
on IDCON’s condition monitoring standard books.

Do not make the mistake of believing that craftspeople or operators know how to inspect
components. My experience is that craftspeople have been trained to do repairs and to
troubleshoot existing problems. Very few have been trained to find problems in inspections
before they actually become problems. Much of this training is a thought process; you need to
teach people to think of inspections in terms of anticipating latent problems.

The CMS documents, together with professionally available training material, form very
unique and effective training material for operators and craftspeople. At a minimum, the
training should include inspection methods for the most common components and systems, as
well as a review of useful basic instruments and tools such as high intensity lights, strobes,
handheld IR instruments, mirrors, leak detectors, etc.

ASSIGN RESOURCES. It seldom works well to just say, “PM is priority one, and we will
assign different people to do it as we see the need,” or, even worse, “our team members
decide among themselves who will do the inspections today.” This almost guarantees that
your PM effort will fail. Another common mistake is to assign people on the shifts to do PM
when they have nothing else to do. If they have nothing else to do, they are not needed on the
shift. The first thing that will be sacrificed in this scenario is the PM.

In my experience dealing with several hundred plants, the best results are achieved when
42
special people are assigned to do inspections on a full time basis. If you assign dedicated
resources to do basic inspections of equipment you will get:

 The right people to do the inspections, adjustments, and repairs. They can do them
during their routes, or after they complete their routes.
 The right people trained in this unique work.
 The ownership and interest for PM that is necessary for continuously updating and
improving the PM work.
 An easier situation to manage, since it is tempting for a supervisor to pull people
chosen for PM in order to do unplanned work that has been added onto schedules at
the last minute.

Wherever the assigned resources (PM inspectors) report in your organizational structure, I
advise that they work closely with the supervisor in the area they inspect. Make sure the PM
inspectors report their findings and what they have inspected to the supervisor once or twice a
day. When their routes are completed, they should do some of the repairs and adjustments that
are the results of the inspections. This cuts back on administration and eases up the friction
that can develop with the craftspeople that otherwise have to do all repairs.

Another bit good advice is to start all routes with an interview of the operators in the area to
be inspected; this will improve communication and on-the-job training of operators.

Revitalizing a Preventive Maintenance Program

By: Clayton Smith and George Munn –
Revitalizing a Preventive Maintenance Program

The Smurfit-Stone paperboard mill at Fernandina Beach, Florida, finds opportunities to

increase mill productivity and reduce costs by improving their preventive maintenance
program.

In recent years, Smurfit-Stone’s Fernandina Beach mill fell from the ranks of the most cost-
effective and profitable mills in the corporation. It didn't happen as a result of increasing
costs, but as a result of the company adding 20 additional mills through mergers and
acquisitions. Smurfit-stone, Fernandina Beach found itself in direct competition, not only with
other companies’ mills, but also with its own sister mills.

Before 1998, Smurfit-stone, Fernandina Beach only had to be more cost-effective than the one
other linerboard mill in its division. Management decided to address the new competitive
situation specifically by addressing maintenance operations and costs, and equipment
reliability through an improved preventive maintenance program.

Fernandina Beach is a fully integrated, ISO 9002-certified kraft linerboard mill with
production capacity of 2,850 tpd. Its three machines produce liner in weights from 26 lbs. to
69 lbs, using a combination of kraft and recycled pulp. The mill operates a large wood yard
that receives both chips and round wood, batch and Kamyr digester pulp mills, a recovery
system including two recovery boilers, two power boilers, two turbine generators and all the
associated water and waste treatment facilities for a large mill.

43
 Of the mill’s 495 hourly employees, 165 are maintenance
mechanics, including 110 mechanical journeymen and 55
electrical/instrumentation technicians.

Three board machines at Smurfit-Stone's Fernandina

Beach mill produce linerboard in weights ranging from 26
lbs. to 69 lbs. Photograph courtesy Smurfit-Stone

Measurement by Benchmarks
Smurfit-Stone has conducted extensive benchmarking studies of all aspects of operating costs
at each of its 21 locations. In the maintenance area, internal maintenance costs, outside
contract utilization, stores inventories and staffing have been compared. Fernandina Beach
managers recognized that significant reductions could be made in the mill’s maintenance
costs to contribute to the its economic well-being. Cost reductions could be made in 1)
equipment reliability, 2) planning and scheduling, 3) outside services and contracts, and 4)
stores inventory.

The number of occurrences that were leading to major production interruptions led to a
review of the mill’s entire approach to preventive maintenance. Management recognized that
a sound preventive maintenance program was the cornerstone of a successful equipment
reliability improvement effort and was directly proportional to the mill’s financial
performance. The decision was made to completely revisit and revitalize the mill’s entire
preventive maintenance program.

Roles and Goals Revised

The first major initiative was to address the existing roles and responsibilities of the various
maintenance groups. Maintenance tasks had been conducted by personnel in both day and
shift maintenance groups. Day personnel were to handle all maintenance issues within day
shift hours and shift maintenance personnel were responsible for issues occurring during other
hours. Preventive maintenance tasks were the primary responsibility of the day crew, with
some tasks handed off to shift personnel.
But break-in work and “emotional” maintenance decisions often got higher priority than the
preventive maintenance tasks on the schedule. Management’s answer to this problem was to
form a separate group with only the responsibility for completing scheduled preventive
maintenance. Day maintenance was assigned the primary responsibility of completing
corrective repairs that had been properly planned and scheduled. The entire maintenance
department organization was revised to bring the entire reliability program under the direct
supervision of one leader. The group was given a charter and a vision statement.
Shift maintenance in the mill was consolidated into a central concept that consists of a
supervisor and seven mechanics on a 12-hour shift schedule. The intention was to take the
break-in element out of the preventive maintenance equation by assigning break-in work to
shift maintenance. Break-in work would be the exclusive responsibility of shift personnel.

The remainder of the department, including both mechanical and electrical/instrumentation

personnel, would work out of area-based shops supported by a planning and scheduling
department and a computerized maintenance management system.

In theory, all three groups were to be dedicated to particular portions of the maintenance
program and would not be distracted by tasks outside their scopes. Management recognized,
however, that it would take some time for this concept to work as planned. Separating tasks
into three different groups called for discipline and significant cultural change, but the goal
44
was to minimize overlap of functions and tasks as much as possible.

Planning and Scheduling

Recognizing that a significant portion of work orders were poorly planned—or not planned at
all—management undertook an initiative to improve the planning and scheduling process. To
give the day crews ample opportunity to complete corrective repairs efficiently and
effectively, work orders needed to be well planned and ready for the mechanics when they
received their assignments.
A new process was implemented, including an emphasis on controlling any backlog of work
orders.

Maintenance Stores
An assessment of a rather high storeroom inventory revealed the urgency of stocking the
correct parts in the storeroom and getting the wrong parts out of inventory. Benchmarking
data showed that the inventory was considerably higher than that of comparable mills. The
storeroom often issued outdated parts, no parts or the wrong parts.

But management recognized that this was the result of a weak preventive maintenance
program with an inadequate planning and scheduling effort, and not the result of poor
storeroom management. In fact, the storeroom was managing quite well the parts that
planners, supervisors and managers had continued to keep in inventory. Getting the stores
process under control required good planning and scheduling, significant reductions in break-
in work and management assurance that the storeroom had the right parts of maintenance
jobs.

Implementing the Vision

Each initiative in the revamping of the Fernandina Beach preventive maintenance program
was assigned team members and a leader. An in-depth “gap” analysis was conducted by the
maintenance consulting firm of IDCON Inc. to identify and measure the differences between
the mill’s maintenance practices and performance and that of high-performing maintenance
organizations in world-class mills. The teams used this analysis as a tool for goal setting at
Fernandina Beach.

IDCON’s services also included eight weeks of training spread over a six-month period. The
goal was to provide guidance in developing a new preventive maintenance process, with
training modules for both salaried and hourly personnel. Mill management’s requirement for
the program development was that it not be a consultant’s production, but that it be a process
developed by mill personnel with a consultant’s assistance. In order for the process to
succeed, the affected personnel had to be directly involved in and in control of the design
changes.

The Challenge of Change

Lack of communication is always a great problem in an organization attempting to implement
change, but it can be the easiest to correct. The implementers of change at Fernandina Beach
used many different forums to communicate the following: 1) why change needed to occur, 2)
who would be affected, and 3) when the change would occur. Implementation teams went to
great lengths to communicate with union leadership, management and all other supervisors
and salaried employees in the organization. Forums included departmental meetings, special
ad hoc communication meetings, and written correspondence and brochures.

Changing the culture of a workplace is probably the most difficult barrier to overcome in a
45
work force. A cultural change was definitely required at the Fernandina Beach mill.
Completing preventive maintenance work is of high importance, but was often given a low
priority in scheduling. With the changes that have been made, management is continually
sending the message to supervisors, planners and the hourly workforce that preventive
maintenance is a high priority and will be so treated. But management also recognizes that it
will take years of discipline to finally realize the benefits of placing the highest priority on
completing preventive maintenance orders.

Clayton Smith is maintenance and engineering manager and George Munn is reliability
supervisor at Smurfit-Stone’s Fernandina Beach mill.

F. Reliability Centered Maintenance

Can you really Justify Reliability Centered Maintenance
(RCM) - Part I

As a result of this column I am risking to receive critique, but also to be given feed back
expressing relief from readers who believe like I do. That is always the case when I write
something about RCM (Reliability Centered Maintenance)

I recently participated in a meeting to design a reliability and maintenance conference.

Twenty-seven people, mostly from plant maintenance and operations organizations, attended
the meeting.

The first day we brainstormed to come up with topics for the conference. The classic subjects
including: Planning and Scheduling, Preventive Maintenance, Root Cause Problem
Elimination, Shut Down Management, Spare Parts Management, etc. were agreed upon to be
included in the conference program. Then someone mentioned RCM as a possible case study.
After a period of silence an operations manager asked cautiously if people still believed that
RCM programs can pay off. In his plant teams had been trained in RCM methodology and
then spent significant time to do analyses that only resulted in obvious and already practiced
preventive operations and maintenance tasks. Several other meeting attendees had the same
experience and the topic of RCM was not included in the conference agenda. Four years ago
this topic was very well covered in the same conference but already then the interest had
started to fade away according to conference evaluations.

To me this was very encouraging to hear. RCM has always reminded me about the parable
“The Emperor’s New clothes” by HC Andersen. Sooner or later someone will ask for
substantial results and if these results could not have been delivered at the fraction of the cost
of the RCM analysis. I always believed and proclaimed, in many other articles, that there is a

46
place for RCM in early equipment design and for very complex manufacturing systems. We
have proven over and over again that for more than 95% of manufacturing systems that
applying this methodology cannot be justified because known standards can be applied to
most equipment components. For examples go to our book store. One part of RCM I myself
have used for over 30 years is the theory of failure distribution and time for failures to
develop to break downs. I never knew it was RCM, I always thought of it as plain common
sense

Before this meeting, I had just completed an evaluation of results from an ongoing RCM
initiative in a plant in Europe. The organization was very proud of their accomplishments.
Teams of between eight and eleven employees worked a total average of 600 person hours on
each analysis. Each analysis was documented in very comprehensive reports with
recommended actions to improve reliability. The outcome of this work included the following
recommendations:

Time
Equipment identification Skill Frequency Action
required

353-001 Brine pump PdM/Va 3 months 4 Hrs

Vibration Analysis
353-002 Brine Pump PdM/Va 3 months Vibration Analysis 4 Hrs
Oil testing Wear Particle
546-048 Gear Box PdM/OA 4 weeks 2 Hrs
Analysis
546-048 Gear Couplings Mech 1 year Disassemble and inspect for wear 2x8 Hrs
546-048 Motor El 1 year Insulation Test 1 Hour
546-048 Starter PdM/IR 1 year Thermograph test of starters 2 Hours
Etc

You do not need to be much of an expert to see that all of the above actions are obvious to do.
It is also apparent that frequencies are wrong and time required to do the job is way too long.
For example, to do Vibration Analysis on a critical bearing every three months is way too
infrequently, it should be done every two weeks and it does not take more than an average of
about five minutes, not four hours. Oil testing frequency is realistic but it does not take two
hours to do. Gear couplings do not need to be disassembled once a year, they can be tested on
the run with stroboscope and an IR gun in less than five minutes. The thermograph test of the
motor and starter should be done more frequently because the failure developing period is
shorter than one year.

After reviewing the results from the RCM analysis I visited the Predictive Maintenance group
and asked what had changed. They shook their heads and said that if they followed the
recommendations of the RCM teams, “things would fall apart here.” “We do all these things
already, but we have the right frequencies.”

I was very upset when I saw what was going on here, how can management fall into this trap
and be blinded with the fancy reports and the often faulty recommendations? This
organization could have spent the time and money to upgrade their existing systems and
technologies and skills. They could for example involve and train their operators to do many
needed basic inspections of equipment.

47
Can you really Justify Reliability Centered Maintenance
(RCM) - Part II
My last column published in the September issue of Solutions Magazine generated much feed
back. I expected to hear critique from devoted “RCM Purists”, but received nothing but
comments of agreement from readers.
Solution Magazine’s poll October 19, 2005 also confirms that very few organizations, if any,
uses complete RCM analysis. Less than 7% answered that they use RCM regularly and 56%
answered that they tried it but do not use it anymore. (October 31, 2005)
Below are written responses from three readers:

“Good article and I agree fully. RCM has its place in things like aircraft design. One large
industrial plant put thousands of man-hours into it and claimed great results, but a visit to
their plant showed that their calculations of benefits was based on assumptions, not hard
numbers and they would not allow entry to the plant to talk to their craftspeople. I also think
they started from a low point and good PM/ECCM would have achieved the same results.
On the other hand, everyone who is responsible for maintenance should read Moubray's book
"RCM II". Its the most logical approach to maintenance that I've ever read, and while it
doesn't need to be applied in detail, the concepts are great.” Don A

“I read you article and agree very closely with your position on RCM. Prior to working in the
paper industry, I worked in a Nuclear Power Plant. We went through an RCM type
maintenance evaluation and the results were similar. It just amounted to a standardized table
of easily identified failure modes and the actions to prevent or detect them. It looked very
similar (to) the example in the article. At least I was able to get the right frequencies put in for
the predictive maintenance work I was doing at the time. It did look like a good way to make
some easy money if you can get a contract for an RCM analysis.

One additional point I would make about RCM that was not in your article is that the general
theory is very good for any one in maintenance to understand. Working through some rigid
RCM examples in the early stages of learning the maintenance profession does help drive the
concepts home. In that respect, I would recommend it as a good training tool for career
maintenance professionals. The training should also include how to take these concepts and
use them in a practical and affordable way. Many maintenance departments have a variety of
PMs on the books that were created when something failed and they had to do something
about it. When we go through RCFA analysis of a failure at the (--) mill, I often use RCM
type logic when someone offers up another PM as the answer to our problem. I basically ask
exactly what the failure modes we are trying to prevent are and will this PM proposal
accomplish that. This tactic has allowed me to kill a lot of bad PM proposals and create some
good ones. It only takes a few minutes of brainstorming and some arguing and the process
done. James J.

“I too have encountered many paper sites where they have tried to apply all of the principles
of RCM (classical) and have failed to produce any meaningful results, in fact, in most cases,
NO results, but with plenty of costly effort.

I believe there is a place for the 'plain common sense' aspects of the RCM process, but
obviously these have to be applied with moderation and show a return in the investment. As
the old saying goes, it's not the process (journey), it's the output (destination) that is the

48
objective. Too often I think we get caught up in the process.” John Yolton. (He has agreed to
include his name)

The Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) Trap

This column is likely to create a lot of reactions from the academia of reliability and
maintenance management, and all comments are welcome.

USING RCM WISELY. Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) has its place, but many
times plants jump into training programs and attempt to implement Reliability Centered
Maintenance long before they are ready for it. The academia of maintenance management still
argue about the definition of RCM. Some even say that if it is not done exactly the way they
prescribe, then it is not RCM. So what? The whole idea is that you want to achieve more cost-
effective reliability through the implementation of better operations and maintenance
practices.

Reliability Centered Maintenance (RCM) has its definite place in the specification and design
phase of new equipment and systems, and for existing critical and complicated systems. The
thought process used, for example, to analyze existing preventive programs, is good, but can
easily be made overcomplicated to serve the purpose. I have analyzed the results of many
RCM implementations, and the fact is that after a very lengthy criticality and failure mode
analysis, the end results have not changed the fact that a V-belt drive needs to be inspected for
an obviously critical belt conveyor! What is often missing is a document describing how to
inspect it while the equipment is operating. In the worst cases, belts, couplings, heat
exchangers, control valves, and other common components are, even after the RCM analyses,
inspected during shutdowns. Perhaps some inspections have been deleted because equipment
was not critical. So, there you might have saved an inspection that only takes two minutes for
an operator who will inspect the process in that area every shift anyway!

I suggest that before you enter into RCM you do the following:

 Do your maintenance prevention well;

 Do your basic inspections well;
 Do your predictive maintenance well.

The first two of the above activities are low cost and easy to implement because of high
acceptance by people in your organization. You can use standard training material to train
people when and how to do inspections. What you do with, for example, a coupling, can be
decided without a complicated analysis. The failure developing period for misalignment
might be two to eight weeks, so you need to inspect it every week on the run using an infrared
thermometer. How to do this is described in a Condition Monitoring Standard for each
common component. (If you would like to receive an example of a standard, please contact
me.)

49
KNOWING THE BASICS. The time to implement is short; a production area can have all
inspections documented, people trained, and inspections executed in less than four weeks. An
RCM approach and implementation could take six months with no different result. An RCM
analysis might lead you to spend days deciding that the primary screen is critical, and that if
the bearings fail the screen goes down; therefore, you need to inspect the bearings—all of
which is obvious.

RCM does not consider planning and scheduling and people efficiency at all, nor does it
include vital support systems such as a technical database and its interface with stores. RCM
is therefore a tool that should be used selectively for critical and very complicated systems
and equipment. It is not a complete reliability and maintenance system. Do not fall into the
trap of believing it is something completely new and different, or that it is a complete program
for reliability and maintenance. I know mills that have spent over three years on RCM
implementation and they still do not have the basics in place and/or executed well. It cannot
be reinforced often enough to do the basics well before you start complicating things.

G. Reliability vs Cost

A plan for breaking out of budget jail

I wrote this column for those who want to improve equipment reliability but feel as if they are
stuck in "budget jail". Assuming your fiscal year starts January 1, November and December is
the time to plan your jailbreak!

50
Most of you understand what I mean by budget jail. In fact, you are probably in the process of
trying to pick the lock. For those who don't know what I mean, I've listed some signs of what
a budget jail look likes:

1. The maintenance budget isn't built from scratch (zero-based budgeting) each year to
consider all major expenses for the coming year.
2. The maintenance budget is, more or less, an arbitrary number (often last year's budget
less X percent) that must be reduced each year regardless of equipment condition.

3. Top management has little understanding for equipment overhaul and major
maintenance cycles. Many cycles aren't annual or more frequent. The cycles for
equipment repair and overhaul are often two, five or 10 years. This can create
performance spikes.

4. You never break the budget for planned investments, but the budget is often broken
due to so-called unforeseen equipment repairs. The plant culture seems to indicate that
equipment breakdowns are a valid excuse for breaking the budget, but investments are
not.

5. If an investment creates a significant profit for the company in the long term but it
breaks the budget for the current year, the investment will be denied.

Do you recognize your plant in the points above? If so, I can tell you that it shouldn't be that
way, and that we must convince top management how to improve reliability. Continuing to
preach the reliability gospel is good. But, is there something we can do to break out before we
get the whole company sold on reliability? I think so.

BREAK-OUT STRATEGY
If you are in budget jail and have tried to get out by preaching reliability to the people above
you but have made little headway, I have a plan. It will test your belief in that a focus on
reliability works. Please note that if you are well on your journey into reliability excellence,
this plan will not be as useful to you, but it may still work in focused areas.

The idea is simple but requires courage. There is a budget allotted to your plant and/or area
for the year. The plan is to break the maintenance budget (assuming it is needed) in the first
quarter but regain the lost money with better reliability by the end of the year. You must be
the judge in how much you can break the budget in the first quarter and still sit in your chair!

In November/December, you will start performing detailed equipment inspections of your

plant and/or area with your best maintenance people using basic inspection tools - flashlights,
infrared temperature guns, stroboscopes, vibration pens and industrial stethoscopes.

If you can, create a team of the best operator and maintenance technician you can find for the
inspection rounds. Have the inspectors report back in a meeting where both operations and
maintenance management are present. This action alone has merits.

The found problems need to become work requests and prioritized. Work closely with
operations to establish a meaningful priority system. The total cost of the potential breakdown
must be considered, not just the maintenance cost. The key parameters to consider are the
same as with any maintenance job:

51
 1. Failure developing period: How long will the equipment last before breaking down?
2. Consequence of potential breakdown (safety, environmental, lost production,
damages, repairs, etc.).

3. Risk that the breakdown actually will happen.

Along with the inspections, try to stop all break-in work that isn't an emergency. A
maintenance department can free up 10 to 30 percent of its resources by stopping these honey-
do jobs.

SUMMARY
Start doing detailed inspections in late 2007. Prioritize the problems found and fix them even
though you may have to break the budget early in the year. Work with operations and
maintenance to get rid of non-critical break-in work to free up resources and/or save money
on overtime and contract work. If you prioritize the repairs correctly early in the year, you
will reduce maintenance cost through better reliability later in the year.

"Focus on Reliability" (part 1)

Reliability Improvements = Cost Reduction

In the May column, I discussed results that a mill had experienced in the ten years following
implementation of initiatives with a primary focus on cutting costs as quickly and extensively
as possible. In summary, it proved to be a financial disaster.

In this article, I will discuss what happened in another pulp mill during a similar time period.

PRIMARY FOCUS: RELIABILITY. This mill decided to focus primarily on reliability

improvements instead of cost reduction alone. This program included the following activities:

 Development of a clearly spoken and well-established partnership between operations,

engineering, and maintenance.
 Replacement of a reactive maintenance policy with one that is planned and scheduled.
Formerly, less than 10% of all maintenance work was planned and scheduled; ten
years later, more than 85% of all work was executed after being planned and
scheduled.
 Implementation of a strong vibration analysis program; prior to the project, the
average vibration level was 0.23 in./sec, but today, it has been decreased to 0.11
in./sec.
 Professional training of lubricators; this training resulted in better filtration, including
water removal, better seals, oil testing, and use of fewer types of lubricants. Cost for
lubrication was reduced by 60%.

52
 Dynamic balancing of all rotating equipment above 1,000 rpm before being put into
service;
 Improvement of many equipment bases by installation of Jack-bolts to facilitate better
alignment precision;
 Marking and rotating of electric motors and rolls in store at an interval of twice per
month;
 Implementation of alignment training, standards, and execution;
 Analysis and improvement of stores inventory and services; by maintaining a service
level of more than 96% to maintenance, stores value was reduced by more than 30%.
 Adherence to preventive maintenance schedules increased more than 90%.

RELIABILITY BRINGS RESULTS. During the first three years of the reliability
improvement program, maintenance costs increased a total of 8% (2.5% to 3.0% per year).
During the same period, reliability - and, consequently, production throughput - increased
steadily from 83% to 90%. After the initial three years, the reliability continued to increase to
92%, resulting in a reduction of maintenance costs by 40% (Figure 1). Figure 2 shows the
financial impacts of the reliability improvement program.

FIGURE 1. During the first three years, maintenance costs increased 8% and then began to
fall, ending with a final reduction of 40%.Reliability and production throughput increased
steadily to a total of over 92% (time and quality performance).

FIGURE 2. Short-term increase in maintenance costs of about $3.3 million resulted in savings
of $17 million annually. Value of increased and sold production represented $18 million
annually ($ values are per year).

"Focus on Cost Reduction" (part 2)

Tough choices
The figures in this column describe an actual case where a pulp mill decided to do whatever it
53
took to cut costs—mainly through maintenance cutbacks. The mill belongs to a big
corporation and was a high-cost producer. When the cost saving initiative started, pulp prices
were low and profitability was low, from a short-term perspective, compared with other mills
in the corporation. The fast-pace cost reduction actions included the following:

• Operations took over maintenance and only did maintenance work that was judged
necessary.
• Planning of work was not done.
• Scheduling ceased to exist.
• The Preventive Maintenance program was handed over to the operators, without training
them in what to do or how to inspect. The Preventive Maintenance inspectors were laid off.
• Shutdown crews were merged with another mill that was a one-hour drive from the mill.
• Painting programs were abandoned.
• Training of craftspeople stopped, etc.

Figure 1. The first two years maintenance costs dropped, then started to increase. Reliability
and quality production throughput also went down and continued to do so for the six years
before reinstatement of basic maintenance processes.

Figure 2. Same data as in chart one but in financial terms ($ values are per year). Short- term
maintenance savings during two years caused disastrous results after only three years.

NO LONG-TERM ADVANTAGE. In the first years after the cost saving initiative began,
maintenance costs dropped from $35 million/year to $27 million/year, and results were hailed
as good. However, reliability soon started to decline. When the initiative started, reliability
was 93%, but bottomed out at 78% six years later, at a time when pulp prices had doubled.

54
The drop of 15% in reliability, and even more in quality production output, corresponded to a
loss of more than 300,000 tons during some very good years when product could have been
sold at top prices. Financial losses, due to low reliability resulting from the cuts in
maintenance spending, were conservatively estimated to have exceeded $1.2 billion during a
three-year period.

TIME TO TURN AROUND. After realizing the catastrophic consequences of its cost saving
initiative, the mill focused on bringing its maintenance up to world-class status. Results have
been very encouraging, and today the mill is a top performer, with reliability now
approaching 94%. Maintenance costs have gone up, but so has quality production throughput.
Manufacturing costs per ton are also lower.
The actions taken to bring maintenance to world-class status included:

• Reinstating Preventive Maintenance inspectors and revising the Preventive Maintenance

program;
• Bringing maintenance back as a central mill function;
• Developing a partnership between maintenance and operations;
• Focusing on planning and scheduling;
• Developing employee capabilities toward joint performance goals;
• Investing capital in new equipment and restoring worn out equipment

Reliability Improvements Drive Down Maintenance Costs

An organization must focus on sustainable results, not just cutting costs. Three case studies
illustrate.
Results-oriented organizations focus first on the quality and volume of production throughput,
followed closely by the cost to produce the required quality and volume. This approach will
improve reliability performance, which will drive manufacturing costs down.

Most organizations focus more on cutting maintenance costs, and, as a consequence,

maintenance costs go down temporarily, only to increase much more than the initial savings.
In addition, reliability goes down, paving the way for losses that can be substantial. This
behavior and results have been proven many times, especially in economic downturns. The
root cause of this phenomenon is often shortsightedness and what the late quality leader Dr.
W. Edwards Deming described as one of the most serious diseases in American industry: "the
mobility of top management."

The three case studies that follow demonstrate what happened in two organizations that
focused on cost reductions and in a third organization that focused on Results Oriented
Maintenance.

Case 1: Cost and head count reduction

The accompanying graph shows a 3-year case study in a food processing organization with an
aggressive cost reduction program. A key measure used in maintenance benchmarking
exercises was the number of maintenance crafts people and first line managers such as
planners and supervisors.

The head count reduction was done through attrition and layoffs. The major mistakes by this
organization were:

55
  To cut costs by reducing only the number of employees and not considering reducing
the need for maintenance or improving work processes.
 To focus on number of employees, instead of hours of maintenance work, including
overtime and contractor hours.

Case 2: Aggressive cost reduction

The graph for this case shows results at a chemical plant, a high-cost producer in its market,
where management decided to do whatever it took to cut costs, mainly in maintenance. When
the cost-saving initiative started, market prices for the plant’s products were low and
profitability in a short-term perspective was low compared to other plants in the corporation.
The fast-paced cost reduction actions included:

 Operations took over maintenance and only did maintenance work that was judged
absolutely necessary.
 Planners were laid off and planning of work was discontinued.
 Scheduling was discontinued.
 Maintenance prevention activities such as shaft alignment were abandoned and
lubrication was handed over to operators without training and implementation of a
documented program.
 The preventive maintenance program was handed over to the operators, without
training in what to do or how to inspect. The preventive maintenance inspectors were
laid off.
 Shutdown crews were merged with another plant about 1 hr drive from the subject
plant.
 Painting programs were abandoned.
 Training of crafts people was discontinued.

After realizing the catastrophic consequences of what had happened, the mill took initiatives
to bring maintenance to world-class status. Results are very encouraging and the mill is today
one of the top performers. Reliability is approaching 94 percent. Maintenance costs have gone
up, so has quality production throughput, and manufacturing and maintenance costs per ton
are lower.

The actions taken to bring maintenance to world-class status included:

 Reinstating preventive maintenance inspectors and revising the preventive

maintenance program.
 Bringing maintenance back to a central maintenance function.
 Developing a partnership between maintenance and operations instead of a customer-
supplier relationship.
 Focusing on planning and scheduling and front line implementation of these practices.
 Developing employees’ capabilities toward joint goals.
 Making capital investments in new equipment and restoration of worn out equipment.
 Implementing front line management action indicators.

Case 3: Reliability improvements first, costs second

This plant manufactures the same product as the plant described in the previous case, but it
decided to focus on reliability improvements instead of only cost reduction. This included:

 A clearly outspoken and established partnership between operations, engineering, and

maintenance was forged.
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  A change was made from a reactive to a planned and scheduled maintenance
organization. Less than 10 percent of all maintenance work was planned when the
initiative was launched. Ten years later more than 85 percent of all work is planned
and scheduled.
 A strong vibration analysis program was implemented. When it started, the average
vibration level was 0.23 in./sec. Today it is down to 0.11 in./sec.
 Lubricators were professionally trained. This resulted in better filtration and water
removal, better seals, oil testing, and fewer types of lubricants. Cost for lubrication
was reduced by 60 percent.
 All rotating equipment above 1000 rpm is balanced dynamically before it is put into
service.
 Many equipment bases were improved and equipped with jack-bolts to improve
alignment precision.
 Electric motors and rolls in storage are marked and rotated twice a month.
 Alignment training, standards, and execution were implemented.
 Stores inventory and services were analyzed and improved. Service level now stands
at 96 percent and stores value has been reduced by more than 30 percent.
 Adherence to preventive maintenance schedules was increased to over 90 percent.

Reliability pays
Reliability improvements increase production throughput and drive down maintenance costs.
Maintenance cost reduction is a consequence of reliability performance; it is never the other
way around.

Case 1: Moving maintenance resources to operations and cutting craft personnel

The number of crafts people was reduced by 14.3 percent the first year. After 1 year, 6
percent were hired back. In the same period, contractor spending went up 88 percent. Total
maintenance hours including overtime, contractor hours, and in-house hours went up 10.5
percent. Total maintenance costs went up 29.2 percent. On top of that, reliability and
production throughput decreased 6 percent. This plant is now investing in hiring and training
more maintenance people, implementing lost maintenance practices, and moving all
maintenance resources back to professional maintenance management after initially
decentralizing maintenance to operations.
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Case 2: Lingering effect of 2 years of cost cutting

In the first 2 to 3 years maintenance costs dropped from $35 million/yr to $27 million/yr and
results were hailed as good. However, reliability started to decline. When beginning this
initiative, overall production reliability (OPR)—the product of quality performance, time
performance, and speed performance—was 93 percent; it bottomed at 78 percent 6 years after
the start of the initiative. At this time the market price for the plant’s products had doubled.
The drop of 15 percent in OPR and quality production output corresponded to a loss of over
300,000 tons during some very good years when product could be sold at top prices. Financial
losses because of low OPR resulting from shortsighted maintenance cost savings are
conservatively estimated to exceed $1.2 billion over a 3-yr period.

Case 3: Focus on reliability

During the first 3 years, maintenance costs increased 8 percent (2.5 to 3 percent/yr). During
the same period, reliability as measured by OPR, and consequently also production
throughput, increased steadily from a low of 83 percent to 90 percent. Reliability continued to
increase to 92 percent. In financial terms, a short-term increase in maintenance costs of about
$3.3 million resulted in savings of $17 million annually. The value of increased and sold
production represented $18 million annually. Total maintenance costs were reduced by 40
percent. Today this plant survives another economic downturn because of the reliability
initiative it initiated and implemented.
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Visible and Invisible Maintenance Cost Savings
In my earlier column I wrote about the Fox versus the Hedgehog approach. That column was
also published in an electronic newsletter and included in the weekly poll. The poll results
show that only 16.7% of all respondents thought their company was a hedgehog company.
The rest viewed themselves as Fox or a mix of Fox and Hedgehog organizations.

This means that most organizations take a short term approach to cost reduction and savings
which in the long term will be very costly. I frequently see examples on this in organizations I
work with. One common example is that cost reduction initiatives almost entirely focus on
visible cost reductions while waste built into the day to day work system are overlooked or
ignored.

Let me give some examples, I hope you do not recognize any of them, but if you do, do not
believe you are alone in doing so.

It is not at all uncommon that operations and maintenance shutdown schedules are wide open
until the morning of the shut down. So the following can be a common phenomenon:

A shutdown of an area is preliminary estimated to require ten hours, if all necessary work is to
be completed. First step to save money is to cut the shutdown to eight hours, so some work
must be postponed, because to bring in more contractors to complete all work will cost too
much visible money. “Perhaps we can run the three rotary steam joints until next shutdown,
they do not yet leak. We know that the carbon rings in these joints only have about 1/8”
thickness left but we take the risk” is one suggestion, so these jobs are cancelled along with
some other work deemed as not urgently needed. During the shut down the operations
manager added three jobs that had been forgotten and was therefore not put on the
maintenance schedule before the shut down. This delayed the start up by three hours. The
coupling for one dryer section drive was to be replaced. After pulling the coupling off the
shaft it was discovered that the coupling was not requested from the store and when it was
found it was not prepared to the right shaft diameter, nor did the key way fit. This was one of
the last jobs, so no time was given to prepare coupling properly. The old coupling was put
back and welded together to be fixed right later.

At start up the steam system was started too fast resulting in a lot of water hammer in pipe
systems. A consequence was that two of the three carbon rings in the rotary steam joints
cracked and the joints started to leak. They could be shut off but this would result in a 10%
slowdown of production speed. Also the cost of repairing the joints went up by 10 times
because of the damaged seal surfaces. The coupling lasted through the startup, but was
forgotten and three months and three shutdowns later, the bearings in both motor and gearbox
failed. The welded coupling was too stiff and also misaligned. This caused six hours of
unscheduled lost production and additional maintenance costs.

The root of the above examples of waste is poor disciplines in prioritization of work, lack of
closing time for shut down schedules, too easy to add on a job even during a shut down, lack
of planning of work etc. But it has always been this way in this organization so the waste is
known and accepted.

The fix to the problem will take time, because it includes a cultural change. “Right now we
have to save what we can in the short term so we do not have time to deal with this now, and

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on top of that it will cost money to improve our work system” is a common saying in this
organization.

The time and cost to improve is visible cost, the existing waste is embedded in the work
system and invisible.

So instead of improving long term and saving long term waste, the visible short term cost
saving initiatives takes over. For example: Cancellation of training programs, reduction of
number of planners and supervisors, postponing needed maintenance work, reduction of
lubricators and handing this important task to operators without training etc. It is
understandable that costs must be reduced, this is needed to survive, but the industry can no
longer count on the next big upswing to afford the cost of short term saving initiatives. So in
this new market mills must take long term improvement initiatives. The short term savings
will often worsen the situation within a three to five years perspective. A long term cultural
change initiative will improve performance substantially in three to five years.

G. Safety and Maintenance

Safety and Reactive Maintenance

Reactive maintenance is here defined as all maintenance work that was scheduled less than 20
hours before it was executed.

It makes sense that there is a strong correlation between safety incidents, injuries and reactive
maintenance. In a reactive situation you might not take the time you should to plan and think
before you take action. The urgency also call out the so common hero in maintenance crafts
people and they take risks they should not take.

During Pima’s conference in New York June 2003 a speaker referred to a study done by one
of the major Pulp and Paper companies; they had concluded that it was 28% more likely to
have an incident when maintenance work was reactive versus planned and scheduled before
execution.

Because of the strong correlation between reactive maintenance and safety incidents and
injuries I suggest that organizations use this as a key performance indicator. To measure it
will drive down both safety incidents and the volume of reactive maintenance. This in turn
will result in increased quality production throughput and consequently lower maintenance
costs.

Since December 2003 we have done a survey on the relationship between reactive
maintenance and safety incidents. In mid January we can show the following empirical data.

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Please go to www.idcon.com to participate in this survey. Click on “Monthly Survey” to
answer three simple questions.

Reference IDCON Safety/Reactive maintenance Survey as of 2004-01-15

In mid January the results shows that 66% of all respondents estimated that more than 60%
of all safety incidents occurred when a maintenance job was executed as reactive. This data
include respondents from many industries. Pulp and Paper Industry represented 36% of all
respondents.

It is a well known phenomenon that many maintenance improvement initiatives are too short
lived to generate the substantial results that are possible. One of the major reasons for this is
the mobility of top management and the new initiatives that then follow. This disrupts and
confuses organizations and after many repetitions of the above people loses faith in the
longevity of the initiative and will only pretend to implement improvements.

According to the Pulp and Paper Safety Association www.ppsa.org the Total Case Incident
Rate per 100 employees and year (TCIR) have gone down from 8.92 in 1990 to 3.05 in 2002,
and if we go back twenty years the results are more impressive.
Why have the industry produced these results? It is not through better planning and
scheduling of maintenance, because that is still not being done much better than 1990. I think
the answer is that safety has had a long term focus without constant changes even when top
management changes. Another important reason is that it is being measured and there is a
positive or negative consequence depending on the results.

My message is that to go the next step in reducing TCIR an important tool is much improved
planning and scheduling of maintenance. It is too important to ignore and it does not cost
much money to improve.

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