The RELIABILITY Conference Learning Session - 22:19 
by Tabby Conrow, General Mills

It’s 1AM in the morning, and your phone rings. There is breakdown at the plant. When you hang up the phone, your head spins running through items like safety risks, production downtime, stocked parts. Now imagine all those worries – gone. We have to improve human safety, improve equipment efficiency, reduce maintenance cost and all while increasing system capacity.

The goal is to develop asset care strategies that balance our current capability and asset availability with the needs of the equipment. The scope is to look at our current organization capability, our PM systems, process rigor and craft skills and stabilize the relationship. The process to improve is a 4 part approach:

Asset spare parts list cleanup – it ensures inventory asset link, provides failure mode by work type and consumable BOM that is searchable in Maximo.
Identify the plants asset care gaps by running a CMMS Maximo query to identify if parts were reactive maintenance, corrective maintenance or preventative maintenance work orders. With this data we then research if the RM parts have a component strategy.
Modify job plan content by defining “time based versus inspection based” for components, pairing usage history with component manufacturer calculations and ensuring that all time based parts are planned to job plans.
Perform the PM balance – create Gantt chart of PMs for the system, eliminate unnecessary PMs and align PM start times with maintenance schedule.
The asset care approach has led to unmanaged spend improving by over 22% from the previous year. As more parts are correctly charged to the asset, we can clearly find the gaps. Since the launch of asset care 2 fiscal years ago, plants have saved over 2 million dollars in parts spend!

We implement asset care strategy at our plants to be a way of maintenance life. Planned maintenance will continue to improve and reactive maintenance will ultimately make it to zero occurrences.