August 2012 Edition of Asset Management and Maintenance Journal

 

Have you checked out the newest edition of the  AMMJ E-Magazine? The August edition has many great articles including:

• Asset Value, Risk & Decision Making
• The Do’s and Don’ts of Effective Maintenance Planning
• CMS Preventive Maintenance Provisions Rile Biomeds
• Grease Analysis in the Field Helps Improve Lubrication
• Implementation of Energy Optimisation Programs 
• Heat and Bearings: Coping with Shaft Expansion 
• Maintenance Management  and TPM Case Study 
• Managing Maintenance Tools 
• True Value of  Maintenance Activities 
• Workscope  Management  for Shutdowns & Outages

Take a look for yourself and let us know your thoughts!

Things to Think About and Do in 2012: Advantage

Below is an excerpt from ReliabilityWeb.com's E-Book: Things to Think About and Do in 2012.

The simple reality is that maintenance departments are cost centers. This means maintenance costs the company money and does not provide a value-added service to the end customer. In short, maintenance departments do not create salable product, yet your job exists solely to support salable product.

Therefore, maintenance must be managed as a competitive advantage. By changing organizational thinking to view maintenance as a competitive advantage, more innovative ideas are implemented. To affect this shift, maintenance is measured by the value produced. First run output becomes a direct measure of equipment capability, therefore reliability.

Reliability value is measured by the maintenance cost of the best sustainable run output. Sustainable output length is organization dependent; common timeframes include 90 shifts, 3 months, outage to outage.

Reliability Value

Best 90 shift output=9,000 widgets

10 hours/shift yields=10 widgets/hour

Maintenance costs for timeframe= $500,000

Maintenance cost/widget= $55.56

Whenever maintenance costs are below $55.56/widget, the company sustains a competitive advantage. That advantage can be used in profit taking, or in lowering the product price to gain market share.

Maintenance decisions are now based on cost per widget. Consider the decision to enter into condition-based monitoring (CBM) at monthly costs of $10,000. To be advantageous, the program must guarantee an additional 180 widgets ($10,000/$55.56 dollars/widget). At 10 widgets/hour, the program must improve equipment uptime more than 18 hours/month.

Under cost center thinking, a $10,000/month CBM program would be an unlikely approval. However, when viewed under the competitive advantage model, it can be approved because there is a tangible measure of success—hours of equipment uptime.

—Kate Kerrigan

Maximum CMMS: Finding Answers For Efficiency, Part 3

Published on Facilitesnet.com, the article below is the final excerpt from a three-part series written by Kris Bagadia.  

Maximum CMMS: Maintenance Mobility

Today's handheld devices bring an added level of functionality to CMMS. The mobility they allow brings greater efficiency to technicians in the field. Consider these examples of the benefits of mobile technology:

• Readings. Technicians who use handheld devices servicing equipment and assets, such as boilers and chillers, can collect key pieces of data, including pressure, temperature, and oil levels. If they find abnormal based on user-defined criteria, the CMMS will send a warning. They can also monitor security checks, perform inspection routes and record runtime data.

• Work orders. Managers and supervisors can distribute work orders using a handheld device. The technicians can perform the actual work with instructions on handhelds, enter data on time taken and work performed, and close the work orders. All the related information is transferred into CMMS, either real time or via a cradle. Departments also can generate work orders using handhelds. You can establish a completely paperless work order system if desired.

• Parts inventory. This area offers an excellent opportunity for managers to use mobile CMMS technology to save money. Storeroom attendants using handheld devices can handle parts receiving, additions and depletions, cycle counts, and annual physical inventory very efficiently. They can issue an item to an employee, work order or an account number, as well as return the issued item to the inventory.

Successfully specifying and implementing a CMMS ultimately will require top management's commitment to stay involved with the project and provide needed support and resources. If these things occurs, the result will be a CMMS that properly facilitates daily technician activities, resulting in efficiencies not possible with manual systems.

Perhaps more importantly, a CMMS also can provide comprehensive information and analysis for managers that support fact-based decisions enabling greater optimization and accountability throughout the organization.

Maximum CMMS: Finding Answers For Efficiency, Part 2

Published on Facilitesnet.com, the article below is an excerpt from a three-part series written by Kris Bagadia.  

CMMS Specification Solutions

Managers whose departments use only a fraction of a CMMS's available features did not specify the most appropriate software. It means the application has many bells and whistles the department does not need. The incorrect selection decision costs the company money on the software's acquisition, as well as user training — money the manager could have saved by specifying the most appropriate package based on department needs.

Whether you are upgrading to a newer version of the CMMS or acquiring a new CMMS, selecting the right package is crucial to a successful implementation and enabling the department to fully use the CMMS's features and functions. Managers should consider answer these specification questions:

• Is it easy to use and flexible? The CMMS should be designed for front-line maintenance technicians, not computer experts. The system has to be flexible enough to accommodate the way they carry out their daily tasks, not the other way around.

• Does it handle queries and reporting effectively? These are two very important functions of a CMMS. Once the implementation is complete, users each day retrieve the desired information and generate reports to help managers make more informed decisions. Managers should be able to retrieve any information required, when they need it and in the desired format. 

• Does it improve workflow? An efficient flow of work — initiating and approving a work request, planning, scheduling, dispatching, completing it, and following up for continuous improvement — is essential for productivity. A CMMS's work-request system enhances the efficiency of the maintenance operation, as well as the requester's productivity. Requesters must have convenient access to the status of open and completed work requests, which prevents dips in productivity by helping them identify and dispose of duplicate requests.
  
  Enabling customers to enter and view their work requests increases efficiency for both the requester and the maintenance department by substantially reducing the number of repeated requests to perform these functions. Repeated calls are a significant drain on productivity, not only due to the time they consume but also because of the unplanned interruption of work by the technician.

• Does it provide a satisfactory parts list? A CMMS should have a provision for specifying parts and tools on PM work orders so technicians can arrive on the job site prepared with required parts, resulting in less downtime.

Maximum CMMS: Finding Answers For Efficiency, Part 1

Published on Facilitesnet.com, the article below is an excerpt from a three-part series written by Kris Bagadia. 

Optimizing your CMMS 

How much of your computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) does your department actually use? The answer to that question is not as straightforward as it might seem. My national survey of CMMS users indicates 94 percent of them use only 10 percent of the software's capacity and features.

Many institutional and commercial facilities use a CMMS as a recordkeeping tool. If that is all they want, a spreadsheet might suffice. Specified, installed and operated properly, a CMMS is a powerful tool that goes far beyond recordkeeping.

By not fully using the CMMS, maintenance and engineering departments are missing out on opportunities to save time and money. And as the utilization of CMMS increases, overall productivity and profitability also increases. 

Spotlight On Benefits 

A properly implemented CMMS increases technicians' overall productivity by improving the work-process flow, helping migrate from reactive to proactive mode, and incorporating PM optimization and trending analysis, among other benefits. It also will improve efficiency and customer satisfaction by organizing, distributing and managing maintenance-related information, as well as eliminating inefficiencies arising from information bottlenecks.

A CMMS provides all stakeholders with real-time information relevant to their responsibilities and activities. Maintenance technicians can obtain a prioritized list of open work orders.  

Requesters can check status information without interrupting maintenance technicians. Service managers can view reports of backlogged work orders, including total estimated backlog hours. Top management can produce comprehensive reports profiling resource utilization and compliance requirements. 

As part of a department's continuous-improvement program, a CMMS can be an excellent tool to identify non-value-added activities and shorten process cycle-times. Maintenance and engineering departments too often spend a great deal of time waiting for parts, approval, instructions and equipment. A CMMS can help managers identify the activities and equipment costing the department the most time and money, enabling them to analyze the situation and correct it. 

A CMMS also can become a powerful tool for analyzing data and using that data to make meaningful decisions. For example, reviewing compliance with work-order schedules, ratios of PM and repair work orders compared to total work orders, and then taking the necessary corrective action. Maintenance departments frequently gather readings on a variety of equipment, such as boilers and chillers. In a paper-based system, technicians and system administrators fill out forms out and file them away, too often never to be found again. Some companies have started using a CMMS to record and save readings of say, pressure and temperature. Using this data, technicians can identify abnormal readings and correct problems to prevent failures. 

Once technicians have defined a certain range of values and criteria, the CMMS will issue a warning immediately upon the reading meeting those criteria. Maintenance planning also can automatically incorporate usage- and condition-based PM, as well as predictive and corrective maintenance, based on abnormal readings.