Joomla! site syndication http://maintenanceconsultants.co.uk Sun, 05 Feb 2012 15:31:40 +0100 FeedCreator 1.7.2 http://maintenanceconsultants.co.uk/images/M_images/joomla_rss.png http://maintenanceconsultants.co.uk Joomla! site syndication http://maintenanceconsultants.co.uk/index.php/Industrial-Maintenance-Consultants.html The differential CSA offer is practical implementation. Our consultants have a range of experience and expertise and are skilled in the practical implementation of solutions. As a company we offer a range of services either partnering associate organisations or managing and leading our own associates independently. We are currently employed on some exciting and innovative projects across a range of areas including Distilling, Defence, Food and Drink and Oil Gas production. As well as industrial maintenance consulting we provide a comprehensive and cost effective range of training courses that can be tailored to your needs and provided 'on site' if required. Please browse the links on the sidebar for more information on training courses and to read our maintenance articles. Not sure you need help? Why not try our questionnaire and see if we could help you? Click here for maintenance assessment questionnaire (images/maintenance_assessment.pdf). Or here for general management assessment questionnaire (images/management_assessment.pdf). Home - Home Sat, 24 Apr 2010 13:15:21 +0100 http://maintenanceconsultants.co.uk/index.php/Maintenance-Benefits-from-Production-Data.html A much underused source of data for Maintenance management in facilities with live production monitoring capabilities is the wealth of information, both live and historic; such systems are capable of delivering. This may be because the decision to install such monitoring is by definition a Production commitment. One of the most efficient ways of running planned maintenance is on an hours run or cyclic basis where production data is the obvious monitoring source. Many production monitoring systems have advance notification capabilities that programmed appropriately can provide maintenance planning the necessary notice of impending scheduled work. This requires (limited) Maintenance access to production monitoring ‘live’ data initially to pick up notifications, but additionally to enable them to re-forecast completed works. From the maintenance planning viewpoint a printout or viewing access to hours consumed on a weekly or monthly basis assists in JIT provision of any maintenance spares required for scheduled works. From a Condition Monitoring and energy efficiency angle production monitoring systems are invaluable and again seldom used to their full potential. Certainly on ‘critical’ equipment current consumption can be recorded and trended (over time and with production loading and rpm). In the simplified example above one would expect to see current drawn having a direct relationship to increased loading or RPM. However, in section ‘X’ the relationship alters and there is a gradual increase in current drawn against a steady state of production conditions; such a pattern serves as an indication that the motors condition is deteriorating. The key to any Condition Based Maintenance strategy is the trending of information and production monitoring systems have that capability and whilst the example may not be particularly sophisticated measure it nonetheless provides a potentially valuable tool in establishing and monitoring deterioration in performance. Parameters that can potentially indicate machine deterioration include… RPM Cycle time Pressure Temperature Moisture levels In fault diagnosis the ability to interrogate production monitoring systems is again a potentially valuable tool to the maintenance department. Essentially there are four root causes for machine breakdown… Deterioration Wrong from the start Something has changed Human intervention Deterioration we have already covered. The most common problems both of which can and usually are captured by production monitoring systems are those of changes (typically speed alterations) and human intervention (typically speed, tolerance or loading). Whilst it should never happen; machines that might be wrong from the start (usually set up from day one to run outside their OEM design limitations) can as a contingency be monitored for increased rates of deterioration. Summary Production monitoring systems have the capability to deliver valuable and concise data to Maintenance in four distinct areas: Scheduling on hours run or cyclic programmes Condition monitoring as part of a Condition Based Maintenance strategy Fault diagnosis – provision of hard evidence (symptoms and trended deterioration) Source data for energy monitoring programmes Where production monitoring (http://plantrun.co.uk) is installed it is often seen exclusively as a production tool, yet it has an often unappreciated and untapped capacity to enhance many aspects of asset maintenance. CSA have implemented cost effective reliability centred maintenance programs for many leading manufacturers. For a no obligation initial chat and an indication as to cost; please complete the form and we will be happy to contact you to discuss how we may be able to help you. form_enquiry Maintenance Articles - Maintenance Articles Fri, 22 Apr 2011 17:24:15 +0100 http://maintenanceconsultants.co.uk/index.php/Improving-Operational-Maintenance.html Improving operational maintenance brings many benefits but do you have the time or depth of resource to achieve change fully or effectively in house? That sounds pretty obvious; improving any management system will bring benefits. Looking back at my own experience the last thing I needed when I was fending off the Production people or ‘fire fighting’ a load of breakdowns that all needed the same man or giving in and donning the overalls myself to deal with a particularly ‘critical’ problem was someone saying “…you should not be in this situation in the first place.” Home - Home Sat, 31 Jan 2009 10:14:06 +0100 http://maintenanceconsultants.co.uk/index.php/Maintenance-Management.html Not another maintenance management article on the latest fad. What is it this time Lean, 6 Sigma, TPM, TQM, RCM, BPR? Yes and no, certainly all those tools and techniques (and a good few besides) have their uses and I have a few articles that refer to aspects of them in this series, but that is not what core maintenance management is about. In my 30+ years experience of managing operations, maintenance people and equipment and specifically some of the scenarios I have come across in my last ten years of commercial troubleshooting, mentoring and training to a variety of industry, public and private sector organisations I keep coming up against the same basic problems, and they are basic, they cannot be overcome by the perceived panacea of computer software (although it can be a valuable management tool), they require leadership across board, senior and operational management level and like it or not that means maintenance management taking the initiative and some pretty mundane but essential work to set things up. Yes we are talking basic maintenance management, because that is what I so often see so poorly understood and mismanaged. It’s not just the small companies, we are talking blue chip organisations here, who are spouting ‘best practice’ initiatives but quite literally do not have, comprehensive or accurate listing of what equipment they have or up to date Process and Instrumentation Diagrams (P IDs). Yet these same organisations demonstrate their compliance to the Health Safety authorities, auditors and client review teams. What they have is a pyramid of systems, processes and procedures balanced, inverted, on a too often extremely poor basic knowledge of what they have and how it is operating (whether it be service or production). This creaking structure has been propped up here and there over the years to keep going, painted a different colour now and then to meet changing demands or fashions and they have convinced themselves that it is the core to their business. It may well be, but often service or production is maintained by individuals despite of the systems not because of them. Ask yourself how many spreadsheets or databases are run by different managers independent of ‘the system’… now convince me your system is working. Don’t get me wrong, there are some good software systems out there and some inspired managers at all levels, but too often they become disheartened because of the situations they inherit, the amount of fire fighting they have to do and the constant demand to optimise resources (save money), add to that the corporate or organisational incentives (flavour of the month), legislative and compliance demands of any modern operation, and keep a demanding ‘system’ updated. CSA have implemented cost effective maintenance improvement programs for many leading manufacturers. For a no obligation initial chat; please complete the form and we will be happy to contact you to discuss how we may be able to help you. form_enquiry Maintenance Articles - Maintenance Articles Mon, 26 Jan 2009 18:55:08 +0100 http://maintenanceconsultants.co.uk/index.php/The-Basics-of-Maintenance-Management.html 1. Introduction Not another maintenance management article on the latest fad. What is it this time Lean, 6 Sigma, TPM, TQM, RCM, BPR? Yes and no, certainly all those tools and techniques above (and a good few besides) have their uses and I refer to aspects of them in other articles, but that is not what it is about and I have not found, invented or put together any new ones. I am relating my 30+ years experience of managing operations, maintenance people and equipment and specifically some of the scenarios I have come across in my last ten years of commercial troubleshooting, mentoring and training to a variety of industry, public and private sector organisations. The trouble is I keep coming up against the same basic problems, and they are basic, they cannot be overcome by the perceived panacea of computer software (although it can be a valuable management tool), they require leadership across board, senior and operational management level and like it or not that means people taking responsibility and some pretty mundane but essential work to set things up. Yes we are talking the basic systems here because that is what I so often see so poorly understood or managed. It’s not just the small companies, we are talking blue chip organisations here, who are spouting ‘best practice’ initiatives but quite literally do not have, comprehensive or accurate listing of what equipment they have or up to date Process and Instrumentation Diagrams (P IDs). Yet these same organisations demonstrate their compliance to the Health Safety authorities, auditors and client review teams. What they have is a pyramid of systems, processes and procedures balanced, inverted, on a too often extremely poor basic knowledge of what they have and how it is operating (whether it be service or production). This creaking structure has been propped up here and there over the years to keep going, painted a different colour now and then to meet changing demands and they have convinced themselves that it is the core to their business. It may well be, but often service or production is maintained by individuals despite of the systems not because of them. Ask yourself how many spreadsheets or databases are run by different managers independent of ‘the system’… now convince me your system is working. Don’t get me wrong, there are some good software systems out there and some inspired managers at all levels, but too often they become disheartened because of the situations they inherit, the amount of fire fighting they have to do and the constant demand to optimise resources (save money), add to that the corporate or organisational incentives (flavour of the month), legislative and compliance demands of any modern operation, and keep a demanding ‘system’ updated. 2. The Basics These are some pretty simple guidelines to what I call the basics, but believe me a lot of organisations tell me they have management systems giving them inputs, Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) measuring outputs and management decisions based on these when the information they input so often is incomplete, corrupted or out of date. 2.1 Equipment / Assets You must know what you have. Seems blindingly obvious I know, but do you really know what assets you have? •Do you have a comprehensive listing on a computerised maintenance management system (CMMS) or a business system package (SAP, etc) •Is it accurate? •When was it last updated? •Do you have a change process or similar to capture new (and removed) items, does it work? •Are the plant diagrams up to date (P IDs), are they included in the change process? Some basic questions, but answer them truthfully. A simple truth is that you cannot expect to manage something unless you know its extent. The 5 questions above are ones I routinely ask a potential client. Often they will have asked me in to address a maintenance strategy issue or equipment unreliability, it is amazing how many tell me with pride that they have captured 60% of their assets onto the cmms or whatever system they have adopted. If this was a football team how happy would the manager be with only having knowledge on 12 of his squad of 20 players? I want to know what I have, how I can identify it, its characteristics, what care it needs, how often it is likely to fail, the implications should it fail, the implications on my departments performance (so that I can warn my customers of any shortfalls), to name but a few. How to do it? In the introduction I said that there are some things that are mundane but essential, I am afraid this is one of them. The ‘how’ is driven to an extent by the ‘why’. We want to know what assets we have so that we can then keep them going as safely and productively as we can, machines are expensive and we must get the most we can from them. Circumstances though will dictate just what maintenance we will adopt for the individual machines. Maintenance Strategy is addressed in detail in a separate article, but for now if we are making an asset list what are our boundaries, do we want every piece of piping, and every plug socket? I use a simple rule If it can be maintained or is subject to routine compliance testing or inspection it should be considered an asset and listed. Asset Listing An asset list is a bit of a misnomer in that it is actually a list of locations, be they functional or geographic of where within a production, service or facility an equipment is allocated. Why? Well because we are not interested in the identity of the individual item as such (serial number) but we do want to know its basic function (equipment type) and where it sits within its allocated function. For Example In a multi line plant we might have conveyors feeding the packaging lines. These would be listed by location/function as below Asset Type Location/Function Allocated tag Conveyor Line 1 feed C1 Conveyor motor assy Line 1 feed MC1 Conveyor Control Line 1 feed INVC1 Conveyor Line 2 feed C2 Etc… Here we introduce the concept of 'tagging' whereby each piece of equipment’s location is identified uniquely within the plant, a simple example to demonstrate first principles that we shall expand upon as we progress. If P IDs exist of the plant, it makes sense to adopt the tags (if shown) from them and in fact the physical asset listing should be carried out against any existing P ID, updating the drawing(s) as necessary. Assigning assets/equipment to functions A plant or site is set up such that the assets are usually grouped either geographically or by function (what they do, what main equipment they control or service). It is useful to define these functional boundaries on working copies of P IDs to allow later database (or CMMS) organisation and structuring. For Example.. The assets/equipment supporting the pumping function has been identified and a boundary identified. Summary Equipment listing is a long and drawn out process but is the only foundation for effective and efficient maintenance and operational management. Any management strategy based on an incomplete or outdated asset list will compromise even the most brilliant system or manager. CSA have implemented cost effective maintenance improvement programs for many leading manufacturers. For a no obligation initial chat and an indication as to cost; please complete the form and we will be happy to contact you to discuss how we may be able to help you. form_enquiry Maintenance Articles - Maintenance Articles Mon, 09 Feb 2009 19:05:47 +0100