Maintaining an advantage

As a result of constant cost pressures, the days when every factory sported its own dedicated maintenance and repair department are on the wane. For many manufacturers outsourcing has provided the favoured route in recent years. Not only does it eliminate the need for a dedicated in-house resource, it passes responsibility for this onerous task, and if delegated correctly, keeps the auditors happy. Contractor selection, however, can be painstaking in order to avoid the raft of oil-can-and-hammer cowboys, while others argue it's simply not a good idea to outsource the care of your plant's vital capital assets to outsiders. One thing is certain, despite the economic shift from recession to tentative growth, any outlay on outsourcing needs to be scrutinised carefully. With this in mind, many astute manufacturers are considering how to get more out of what they already have. To achieve this, they still need to acquire the services of an external company, typically in a consultancy role, but the total cost is usually less and the returns can be quicker. Among the companies supporting this growing trend is Reliable Manufacturing, a reliability-based change management consultancy that claims to deliver performance improvement through the implementation of maintenance and operations (best) practices. Reliable Manufacturing's intention is to establish 'a culture of reliability' in an organisation, whereby all employees take responsibility for the care of assets – this invariably necessitates cultural change and a top-down/bottom-up approach. RM's rapid transformation process is a workshop-based programme that uses simulation tools to help accelerate the rate of change. The company says that ROI is quick and substantial, with little upfront investment (it's pretty much pay-as-you-go). "The people closest to where the work gets done, are the ones who best understand what's not working well, and given the right opportunity and encouragement, they are the ones who can provide solutions to maintenance problems," explains RM's managing director Andrew Fraser. "People tend to own what they create and this approach brings about the required cultural change and sustainability. It's often the case that managers in these organisations are heavily loaded and this can be a barrier to driving improvement in areas such as maintenance. In these situations RM manages the improvement programme for the organisation, handing over the reins once the process is embedded in the organisation and its own people are driving improvement and business value. "The RM programme is designed to achieve significant behaviour change and performance improvement in 6-12 months, along with it a return of up to 10 times the original investment in that time," he adds. A recent beneficiary of RM's service is Chevron, a Pembroke-based refinery that specialises in processing heavy, lower quality crudes. Recognising the impact a major failure would have on production, it engaged the consultancy to help establish a sustainable reliability programme. A masterclass facilitated by RM helped identify a number of key areas where improvement could be made. The project was part of a strategic initiative to raise the importance of operational discipline and to ensure operations and maintenance teams complete every task the right way, every time, thus improving reliability, efficiency and safety at the refinery. "The work ethic and communication between teams has been first class and we've made some significant improvements already," says Chevron's Richard Allen. "We believe we've now got the best lube oil management system within Chevron and are probably starting to hit world class standards. We've reduced lube oil usage, while the meantime between failures of seals and bearings has improved significantly, which means we're getting greatly improved equipment efficiency. The masterclass has encouraged ownership of the plant among the workforce and helped establish the importance of machinery care and maintenance." The trend of refining in-house maintenance efforts has not gone unnoticed by some of the globe's largest and most recognised manufacturers. Volvo, with five manufacturing sites across Europe (four in Sweden and one in Belgium) is a case in point following its decision to bring together the maintenance philosophies of the different organisations and rationalise operations at the five sites using the know-how of Mainnovation as a neutral partner. The workshops were structured around the value driven maintenance (VDM) model, which enables those involved in the maintenance operation to identify which of the maintenance 'value drivers' is most important to their operation. Today's maintenance managers are constantly balancing higher machine availability (asset utilisation) with lower maintenance costs (cost control). In doing so, they must take into account safety, health and environment regulations. To make everything work, they need to use the right technicians, spare parts and knowledge. For Volvo, the biggest change across the five plants was to get rid of diversity and to establish a common way of working. Part of this process involved installing some new rules and making maintenance less complex. To ensure this common way of working, a 'gatekeeper' rule was put in place whereby all modifications coming from production and maintenance were overseen. The gatekeeper communicated all proposed changes to all parties (different shifts, departments, and so on) for common agreement that could then be enacted. The result was a 'blue box' system where spare parts, work orders, permits and risk assessments were collected prior to a task being actioned, which has increased technician efficiency. Bengt Svensson, maintenance manager at Volvo says of the factory in Torslanda, Sweden: "The results speak for themselves. Prior to the VDM project, the maintenance cost per car was £62, while now it's down to £31, a 50% reduction in cost representing a saving of £6.35 million per year." Another way of boosting in-house maintenance prowess is to consider condition monitoring systems. Condition monitoring, for predictive and preventative maintenance, is being used increasingly throughout industry, with the long-term reliability of manufacturing and process systems depending on devices designed to allow operators to react to impending failure within the system being monitored. In many instances, however, failure is due not to normal wear but incorrect installation and maintenance of equipment and components. It is, for example, common for shafts to be misaligned, for rotating parts to be incorrectly balanced and for lubrication systems to be under-specified for the task in hand. According to bearing specialist SKF, it is estimated that 14% of all bearing failures are due to incorrect installation! One site to recently address condition monitoring is the Girvan whisky distillery on the Ayrshire coast. Having built a new malt distillery and a state of the art laboratory, William Grant & Sons is forging ahead with a programme of new product development, aided by the installation a motor condition monitoring (MCM) system from Artesis. MCM units have been installed on three separate yet critical machinery and plant applications, spanning a range of motor sizes from 22 to 250kW: an agitator on the batch-cooking vessel and the drive motors for hammer milling of both malted barley and wheat. From an operational and maintenance perspective, the monitoring system has allowed William Grant & Sons to be more accurate in implementing a stop time, changing the milling screens in the malt milling application based on electrical signal analysis rather than personal judgement. Of course, there is no stopping a company determined to outsource, and there are always circumstances when this option is undoubtedly the best way forward. However, there are also some golden rules that need to be considered. Firstly, consider setting up a contract that includes an incentive for the contractor to continuously perform better. Why? Well, if the contract is based on simply acquiring service alone, there is no real incentive for the contractor to improve. The more hours sold, the more money the outsourced maintenance provider can make, and it can sell more hours if maintenance needs are reactive. Only the fear of losing the contract will motivate the contractor to perform better. If there is an incentive for a contractor to deliver reliability, it naturally follows there will be an incentive to perform preventive maintenance, planned maintenance, scheduled maintenance, and so forth. In selecting a contractor, consider not only rates but what reliability and maintenance process will be implemented, and how results will be measured. Go into detail on the basics of how the contractor will decide whether to prevent or not prevent component failures, how planning will be done, how scheduling will be done, which key performance indicators will be used, and whether the latest technologies will be deployed. With regards to the latter, Kawasaki Precision Machinery is one company providing a good example of how new technology can further the offering of a contract maintenance provider. KPM is providing a maintenance service boosted by the recent acquisition of a Flir T425 thermal imaging camera, which is helping it to predict mechanical faults in lifting, pumping, moving, steering, winch control or regulating equipment before they become costly failures. "We are actively developing new programmes to improve our overall equipment efficiency (OEE) by reducing unplanned downtime," explains Ray Wilson, KPM's assistant manager for maintenance. "To that end we are moving from a reactive to a proactive approach. We have appointed a PPM [CHECK] engineer and it's his job to encourage machine operators and production managers to use predictive maintenance tools. Thermal imaging is now one of the tools at his disposal." Some argue that by outsourcing maintenance during slow business cycles, significant improvement can be made with little responsibility falling on internal staff. Internal resources can focus on the core issues of maintaining or growing market share through tough times, while the professional maintenance contractor can focus on making sure the equipment can run when needed. It is, at least, an idea worth investigating. [] Maintain a clean environment Businesses are losing money unnecessarily through staff sickness and declining work rate as dirty ventilation systems which do not work efficiently affect workspace air quality resulting in headaches, fatigue, loss of concentration and absenteeism for staff. "It is incredible that some businesses still invest so little in the maintenance of their ventilation systems when air quality has a direct effect on how their staff feel and perform at work," says Dermott Quinn, managing director of Ductbusters, which specialises in the cleaning and maintenance of ventilations systems. "They may grumble about demotivated staff in the winter months but they should look at how long ago they cleaned and serviced their ventilations systems. They may think they are saving money but it is a false economy," Worst affected are large open plan workspaces with automated heating, ventilation and air-conditioning systems which see an increase of pollutants in the air like dust, fungal spores, chemical pollutants such as cleaning materials and ozone from photocopiers and printers. A recent study revealed that work areas with above-average ventilation rates have up to 80% fewer symptoms of 'sick building' syndrome among staff, while areas that doubled their ventilation rate saw a 35% decrease in short term absence in the workforce.