In a great step forward from management, an experienced reliability engineer was hired to help improve plant reliability. The first task for this engineer was to determine the equipment that causing the biggest losses for the business. Having had a CMMS in use for a number of years, this was the obvious place to start. The first place to look was the breakdown data, and this was easy to locate, as all breakdown work requests had been tagged in the CMMS. The breakdown crew had been trained well in the use of the CMMS, and each breakdown had been coded appropriately, which made it easy work to identify chronic losses.

The next place to look was in high-cost areas, so a work order cost report was run that spilt the costs against the equipment hierarchy. Because the equipment hierarchy had been structured well and all relevant hours and materials had been booked against the correct area most of the time, a picture of high-cost items was developed quickly. Matching the chronic losses and costly repairs over the last 12 months, it was easy to find where the effort needed to be applied, so task briefs were raised so maintenance planners could begin planning some critical repairs and engineering could prepare some capital submissions.

The planners developed a plan in the CMMS for the repairs by estimating hours and purchasing materials, which were easy to find as they had all be catalogued and put in bills of materials. In a few instances the planning had already been done, as the work had been done before and the job had been saved as a task list in the CMMS. When all materials were available for the task, the scheduler reviewed his list of work orders from within the CMMS, checked his labor availability through the automated connection to the HR module, and then matched the labor to the task that would be completed in the following week. In the following week, all tasks were completed as they had been planned so well, the planner closed off all the tasks in the CMMS, and this data was now captured for reporting. At the end of the week, a PM compliance measure of 100% was reported, and planning accuracy was spot on. The capital work was still in the approval stage, but at least all the maintenance work was completed on time and to budget.

Is this how it works at your workplace?

Mark Brunner has been working for over 30 years in the steel industry in Australia. Currently he is responsible for plant reliability and production data mangement systems the CMMS in his business unit. www.thereliabilityroadmap.com