Availability-based maintenance within an asset management programme

Mike Organ, Tony Whitehead and Mike Evans

Albright & Wilson, Widnes Works, Widnes, Cheshire, UK
Introduction The dictionary definition of maintenance is to keep in existence. Traditionally, the way a maintenance department has kept an operation in existence is to fix it when it has broken down. A modern maintenance department however, should see its role as being much wider, by helping to realize lazy assets and grow profits. Maintenance should be proactive. It should be battering on the works managers door to demonstrate : How to stop things breaking down in the first place. How to build in reliability. How to increase on-time. How to increase instantaneous output. A modern maintenance department should see its role as a leader in the management team. To achieve all this you have a few mountains to climb. You have to convince your colleagues you are forward looking and share their vision, you can move forward as a team and your approach will work. Production Scheduling In a manufacturing process there is usually a way to optimize the sequence of events or stages. There is a path (or paths) which lead to the maximum utilization of materials, equipment, people and cash flow. This became known as the critical path and is frequently used in discrete manufacturing processes and most capital projects. As systems developed, especially computer-based, all the stages and components of a process, with their differing requirements, were combined into one manufacturing plan or master production schedule (MPS). Material planning One of the most important stages on the road to manufacturing integration is the planning of material requirements. In simple terms this relies on two elements: what is needed to make a thing and when it is needed. These are usually called the bill of materials (BOM) and material requirements plan

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Journal of Quality in Maintenance Engineering, Vol. 3 No. 4, 1997, pp. 221-232. MCB University Press, 1355-2511

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(MRP). In many process industries (especially chemical) there is great difficulty in managing both. It may be possible to provide a detailed mass balance of the process and hence determine a clear relationship between raw materials, intermediates and finished products. However, this invariably assumes that all the manufacturing elements of the process (the plants) are operating within some stable and predictable condition. Capacity planning Life is full of compromises, and life in a process industry is doubly so. The MPS and MRP can give indications and decision support but they do not make decisions. This is, as always, left to people. In many industries, the actual capacity of a piece of plant and equipment is usually somewhat more than its apparent working capacity. This reserve (hidden) capacity is there to allow for things to go wrong, and go wrong they usually do. The importance of this should not be underestimated, it can be in excess of 10 per cent of a plants actual capacity and represents a large untapped resource. Manufacturing resource planning If you know what you want to make, have the materials available (and these include services, plant and equipment as well as people) and you know the best way (order) to make them, then you can call it manufacturing resource planning (MRPII because MRP has already been used). JIT, MTO and MTS Just-in-time (JIT) manufacturing can now be seen simply as all the floats in the production schedule being reduced to zero. Each stage is integrated with the next, eliminating lost time and significantly reducing inventory. Made to order (MTO) and made to stock (MTS) among others, are just other sets of options within the overall MRPII system. It is probably clear that with JIT manufacturing the condition of the production plant is critical. Manufacturing philosophy If nothing else, MRPII, with all its problems and difficulties, represents a cornerstone in the understanding of how modern businesses work. It allows for the development of a single coherent view of how each element in the manufacturing process interacts and influences every other. It provides a number of powerful and sophisticated tools that support the efficient utilization of all resources. However, given all this, it cannot work properly because it ignores the problem of maintenance. Maintenance Traditional maintenance The first generation of maintenance was based on how well a maintenance department responded to breakdowns. Production plants were robust and

maintenance departments (and maintenance costs) relatively large. Individual experience and expertise was slow to develop and even slower to be shared. With the development of planning techniques (initially based on paper systems and subsequently computer-based) and the standardization of production plant and equipment, planned/preventative maintenance techniques developed. They were seen as replacing expensive, unreliable breakdown-based maintenance. Unfortunately, in most cases the introduction of such systems followed, and required the removal of the older maintenance systems before they could be assimilated into these new systems. In some cases the gaps left have never been adequately filled. Reliability-centred maintenance Reliability-centred maintenance (RCM) is not a maintenance tool or technique but it is one of the most powerful methods available in the application of maintenance tools. It provides two important pieces of information: the criticality of a piece of process equipment and the most appropriate maintenance regime to apply to the equipment. The maintenance regime could be: Preventative. Experience is a very valuable teacher. There is nothing wrong in seeking expert advice, from whatever source, to prevent problems occurring. Planned. There are always circumstances when planned maintenance is by far the most appropriate method. If we integrate maintenance with business planning systems there are significant benefits. It is worth being cautious about contracting out planned maintenance as this can be expensive, unresponsive and very difficult to reverse. Breakdown. If a plant has excess capacity and preventative maintenance is difficult or expensive, then it may be appropriate to let the plant break down. To minimize any inconvenience, standby equipment can be installed, providing it is ready when required. This can most easily be seen in the use of modern electronic control systems. Condition monitoring. With increased computing power and reduced cost this area is expanding at a fantastic rate. The uses and benefits of vibration analysis, thermography and microscopy are still being developed. Design-out. Maintenance is an empirical rather than an analytic science. This is simply because the model required to predict the maintenance requirements of a plant is at least as complex as the plant itself. In this case, the designing-out of problem areas incurred at the design and installation stages is common. If plant is to improve (increase production, reduce costs etc.) then the design-out role of a maintenance department is vital. Each of these has its costs and benefits and each must be used in the most effective way, with due regard for the departments which maintenance serves.

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The important point is that all these techniques play their part in an integrated maintenance philosophy in much the same way as MRPII supports manufacturing. Unfortunately, as with MRPII, RCM does not provide all the answers, as it too tends to miss the importance of people. People Mutual co-operation? When maintenance, and production for that matter, are dominated by breakdowns, people become somewhat polarized. At best, they tend to cooperate with each other rather than work together, at worst, there is more blame than action. Co-operation should not simply be dismissed, as people become specialists in their own area. In most industries tradespeople and process operators take great pride in their work and do work very effectively. The problems become apparent when management attempts to provide one person with all the skills of a group and then leaves them to cope on their own. The myth of multiskilling Albright & Wilson, like everyone else, has tried to define and introduce costeffective maintenance. Again, like everyone else, we have concentrated on the introduction of multiskilling for our tradesmen and computerization of our procedures. We have sought to define the skills required of a craftsperson, and then devise a mechanism to utilize these skills, the intention being to produce multiskilled people working to a timetable devised by a machine, capable of completing any and all tasks asked of them. We employ any number of ideas aimed at improving productivity: having craftspeople on shifts; taking craftsmen off shifts; employing contractors; contracting out maintenance altogether; process flexibility; standardized hours etc. We have remote, sophisticated and unfriendly computers with equally sophisticated procedures. In many cases the introduction of multiskilling has simply replaced the problems of breakdown maintenance with new ones. Flexibility and the rediscovery of teamwork Over the last few years there has been a growing realization that people and not technology or systems are the future of any organization, particularly engineering. With this realization has come the ideas of empowerment and releasing the hidden resource. Teams have one thing in common the effectiveness of the team is much greater than the sum of its members. This is not the old style co-operation but a shared understanding and acceptance of responsibilities. Success is measured by achieving agreed common objectives and not individual benefit. We are close to the position where there is little advantage in enhancing skills (as we currently understand them) or extending flexibility. However, it is clear that there is still enormous scope for improvement, in which case we need to ask what comes next.

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Total productive maintenance It is almost always easier to say things about improvements and desired outcomes in the performance of inanimate objects (plant and equipment) than it is to say them about people. It also seems easier for management to invest in making plant work more efficiently rather than people. It has taken total productive maintenance (TPM) to provide a route between the way things are done and the way things should be done. It has also provided a destination and signposts along the way. The implementation programmes of TPM have had their share of problems but have also supported the formulation of integrated maintenance systems, utilizing all available resources, without demarcation and artificial barriers. Asset management Asset management is sufficiently broad as to be one of those strategies with the potential of encompassing everything. The only problem is that it would be too big to be manageable. Albright & Wilsons asset management statement is as follows:
Albright & Wilson attaches the highest priority to the safe and efficient operation of its manufacturing assets. The company will ensure high levels of profitability and customer satisfaction through the safe and trouble-free operation of plants which are optimized for cost, quality and throughput. The requirements for capital will be minimized by fully exploiting the potential of these assets.

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The delivery of this process is via a corporate procedure itself made up of a number of stages (somewhat abridged) : Define the plant/process objective in the form of sales potential. Supply and regularly update a sales forecast to indicate how the business will develop in the absence of production constraints, using the best information to hand. Business objective alignment. Determine the level of resources required to achieve the sales forecast and any other objectives of the operation. This would include environmental, health and safety and any other internal or external requirements or constraints. Review the sales forecasts against current capability. Conduct a review and publish an assessment of the current asset capability. The review will assess future operating levels and highlight opportunities for improvement. The difference between required and current assets are then translated into a cost effective development plan. Ensure that best practices are available to those who need them. Crossfunctional representatives of associated businesses and/or similar production units most likely to contribute to, or benefit from, operational improvements are included in the development team. This stage recognizes that no individual or organization has the monopoly on good ideas and equally no one can be isolated or ignored.

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Implementation of the development plan. Implementation of the development plan covers all the phases of capital development from conceptual designs to post-implementation. Inherent in this stage is the requirement to minimize the allocation of capital. It also covers the development and control of maintenance related initiatives as well as the co-ordination of maintenance and capital. Review of the development plan. This stage includes the collection of operational data and the identification of improvements in operational capacity. At the same time these are reviewed they can be compared with revisions in the sales forecast. In this way the development process can be optimized and any problems or opportunities identified early. Provide for continuous improvement. While it is always good to build in continuous improvement, in practice it helps to have this as a specific item on the asset management agenda. It also establishes criteria against which improvements in the operational unit as well as the asset management process can be measured. These can include: meeting the planned implementation schedule; accuracy of the sales forecasts; completion of business objectives; costs; actual improvements in operational capacity etc. One of the main differences (advantages) of asset management over other strategic business objectives is that it has a specific process attached to it, rather than a simply do good things approach. The process may take different forms and have different names in other companies and organizations; nevertheless, it is a powerful tool that is wide-ranging and relatively easy to apply. All for one We have discussed four important aspects of modern business management: production; maintenance; people; and asset management. This list is not intended to be complete and final but covers as many factors as needed to support the general principle. The next questions are how they interact with each other and how they can be integrated or combined to support the success of the business. The terms strategy, policy and tactics are often invoked to describe thoughts and ideas that are felt to be more or less important. The terms themselves are academic but are useful in understanding the relative strength or weakness of these ideas. Figure 1 attempts to show graphically the structure underlying the development of an integrated business philosophy. The figure may oversimplify and compartmentalize the actual structure; it may also appear to place boundaries where there are none. However, we believe this explains and supports a number of important points: There are several layers to business management (as if life was not complicated enough). Each is separate, but each is connected both above

Strategic Policy
ISO9000 JIT MTO

Manufacturing resource planning

MTS OPT

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Total quality management

Tactical
SPC Procedures Right first time Competence Projects Capital development Capacity planning Planned CM design-out NCQs Schedules

Training Teamwork

Empowerment

Human resource management Figure 1. Underlying structure for the development of an integrated business philosophy

Asset management

TPM

RCM

Avaiability-based maintenance

and to the side. If one layer or element is removed, ignored or ineffective then the whole structure fails. Some initiatives are felt, by some, to be the same the differences are explained away as semantics but they are not. The best example is total quality management (TQM) and ISO9000/BS5750. BS5750 is a policy and not a strategic business objective. If BS5750 is imposed on a business then it will, and frequently does, cause more trouble than it is worth. Equally, if a company has achieved BS5750 accreditation it can, in some small part, say it is moving towards TQM but they may be a long way from realizing it. TPM and RCM cannot, of themselves, provide an answer to the problem of plant maintenance as we believe they too are policies. A mistake frequently made is to think RCM can be installed at the design stage of a capital project. Project design is vital but, without feedback from maintenance, other projects , and the development of cross-functional teams (TPM), all that is done is an expensive and largely wasted failure mode analysis (FMECA). In the same way, without a technical rationale (RCM) TPM breaks down to a group of people trying to do good things. One of the most important current issues is training, as recognized by NVQs and the Investors In People programme. Training and skill enhancement work extremely well in supporting a proactive maintenance regime as they encourage openness and trust, promote problem solving and change attitudes.

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To try and cover all possible connections would be a little time consuming. The point is that, while it may be convenient, at times, to see things in small parts it is also important to try and see the whole. Availability If one imagines an MRPII system where the production demand follows closely the sales forecast (you wish), the MRP and MPS are accurate to within a couple of percentage points. All the operators know how the process and quality control systems work and use them. You press the button, there is a loud bang, you destroy the plant, use all the raw materials and fill the warehouse with rework. The best production planning systems are irrelevant if the plant is not available to make anything. We have previously discussed the reduction of declared capacity to allow for problems. The other way of providing greater apparent availability is by increasing stock levels. The impact on production planning systems is relatively minor but the impact on cash flow and working capital can be profound. In terms of the integration of business management strategies we would suggest the following simple empirical formula applies: Availability = Stocks + Rate Time Rate is how fast you can make things and time is how long you have to make them; availability usually means product availability for sale. In todays business environment two facts are clear availability must increase and stocks must decrease. In many industries (paper, chemicals, food etc.) it would be better to define output in terms of a financial rate ( contribution per hour) than tonnes produced, as this gives a much clearer indication of the importance of availability. To increase the rate on a plant usually requires modifications to the plant which in turn requires capital. To increase the time means increasing its reliability, usually a function of how well the plant is maintained. While this simple formula is not mathematically rigorous, it provides a way of looking at the relative importance and interdependence of a number of business strategies. Asset management and availability-based maintenance The parts of this process most relevant to maintenance are: Review of current capability. Ensure that best practices are available to those who need them. When actually applying this, the process can be reduced (with a little squeezing) into three questions : What can the plant/process produce without spending anything (very much)? What can be produced by developing, changing or enhancing the plant/ process?

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What new plant (or piece of equipment) would give us everything required by the business capacity, quality, cost structure, reliability, technology etc.? One of the advantages of answering these questions is that they help to define a new relationship between maintenance and capital projects. Changes to existing equipment and the provision of new equipment tends to be capital. Making the most of what we have is usually maintenance. Minor changes usually require minor capital. If we concern ourselves with not spending anything, more than absolutely necessary, then we need to be clear on what maintenance is all about. In the past, maintenance (the department) replaced equipment, whether planned or breakdown, on a like-for-like basis. It is increasingly clear that this rather restricted view of maintenance no longer supports the pace of business. The allocation and control of capital is a subject outside the scope of this paper. However, the exchange of maintenance and plant design information is vital and should be the objective of any, and all, engineering departments. The thought of having two fortresses fighting each other from their respective ramparts, while the world avoids both, is ridiculous. The ABM part of asset managements review of current capability is: Produce a flow diagram (something like a P&ID but easier to understand). From this, a reliability block diagram can be drawn. Assess availability from the plants maintenance history, production/capacity planning and failure analysis (both maintenance and production). Develop a maintenance strategy based on manufacturing requirements and taking account of maintenance resources and techniques. Ongoing review against the asset management programme. It seems clear that this process, itself, is entirely consistent with the asset management process. It also seems clear that the analysis of business, operational or maintenance requirements are all the same. MRPII and availability-based maintenance The links here follow naturally from the asset management process. Given that we have a maintenance strategy, based on manufacturing requirements, a number of modifications can be made to the MRPII system: The capacity planning module could be used to explore the sensitivity of the process to changes in the availability of the plant, in the same way as it is currently used to explore sales opportunities. This also has the advantage that the true value of proactive maintenance would be recognized as apparent capacity increases.

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Information from the condition monitoring and maintenance planning systems could be exchanged with the MPS. Time would be reserved for maintenance on the manufacturing calendar, or better still, slotted into process changes (production windows). In addition, production would reserve the right to insist that the plant was available for critical production runs because they would already know the plants condition. Maintenance tasks could be incorporated into the manufacturing schedules carried out by process operators. Process-related condition monitoring would be input into the shopfloor data-capture systems and sent to maintenance.

People and availability-based maintenance Maintenance is a collective responsibility; those most capable of performing the function should be given the tools and resources to do so. The responsibility for establishing an efficient and effective maintenance programme may well lie with a maintenance department, but this programme could be put into practice by production. It seems clear that there are close links between RCM and TPM, even if those actually doing the work see only minor additions to the schedules they use every day. There is little or no difference in measuring a bearing temperature to measuring the temperature of a product, triggering remedial or preventative work by the maintenance department. In the coming months the phrase to watch out for is plant care. Food phosphates Our food phosphates complex is one of nine plants producing a wide range of sodium phosphate based additives for the food processing, pharmaceutical, agrochemical industries. In the last four years there has been the minimum of capital investment (something less than 250,000). The reasons for this are related to the availability of raw materials and the need to optimize existing process capacity. Three years ago our chief executive, via a cost of quality programme, identified this plant as a key cost of quality project. It is, perhaps, no surprise that having to report to him once a month concentrated our collective minds wonderfully with the following results (see Figures 2-4). The graphs show that without any significant increase in maintenance costs (in line with inflation) and no major capital investment, downtime has more than halved and production increased by over 26 per cent. The value of the contribution of this is in the order of 2,500,000. In simple terms, focusing on availability-based maintenance can generate returns an order of magnitude greater than an equivalent capital investment. Conclusion As a conclusion we would like to make a number of recommendations regarding maintenance:

Percentage 20

Key Actual Average

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10

5 Figure 2. 1993-1996 maintenance related downtime

J FMAM J J A SOND

J FMAM J J A SOND

J FMAM J J A SOND

J FMAM J J A SOND

Months Percentage (of 1993 average) 170 150 130 110 90 70 50

J FMAM J J A SOND J FMAM J J A SOND J FMAM J J A SOND J FMAM J J A SOND

Key Actual Average

Figure 3. 1993-1996 FPC production

Months Percentage (of 1993 average) 190 Key Actual 170 Average 150 130 110 90 70 50
J FMAM J J A SOND J FMAM J J A SOND J FMAM J J A SOND J FMAM J J A SOND

Figure 4. 1993-1996 site maintenance costs

Months

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We need to find a new name for maintenance; it sounds and feels like keeping things the way they are unreliable. Start where you know you will make a difference, even if you do not really know what you are doing. Find groups of people, in all disciplines, that seem to know what they are doing and introduce them to each other. If you have sales, accounts and production on your side the works manager is easy. Try not to let the RCM junkies bury the whole process in a mountain of paper and endless meetings. Most of us are running plants not designing space shuttles. If we reduce the number of times one item breaks down it will be one less to solve tomorrow. Teach yourself how to use the MRPII systems. In all honesty it is much easier to provide a maintenance module for an MRPII system than to try to integrate the current maintenance management systems into them. Overall, there is more to be gained by our friends in production using a module on their systems than them trying to use ours you probably only need the one system anyway. Start today. The last 20 years have seen changes in engineering maintenance greater than the sum of the changes in the last 200 years, but maintenance is still regarded as the thing you do when something goes wrong and that is by the people on our side. The need for maintenance to be taken seriously, as a positive influence on the business, is not based on some small-minded notions of self-importance and individual influence but on hard-nosed economics. To have a say in the decision-making process we have to have something worth saying and worth listening to. We also have to learn to talk the same language as everyone else.
Further reading Doyle, A.J. (1994), Maintenance Audit of Albright & Wilsons Food Phosphate Complex, WM Engineering Ltd, Manchester, April. Peters, T., Liberation Management Necessary Disorganization for the Nanosecond Nineties, Pan Macmillan, London.