Category Archives: CMMS and EAM

‘Bucket’ work orders

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‘Bucket’ work orders for recording hours are a sure indicator/sign of business process failure around the CMMS. These buckets of time fulfil a misplaced management need to account for the billing of maintenance hours, even though there is no evidence as to what work was done. As a simple rule of thumb I would suggest that any work order that has a duration longer than one week should be reviewed to be broken  down.

Recording hours – I believe it is very important that the maintenance culture should support the technician recording and taking credit for all the hours that he spends on a work order. This should include safety/review of procedures, wait time (permits/isolations etc.), looking out/collecting materials, wrench time, and fully recording what was done in the CMMS and providing feedback on the planning and content of the work order.

Failure Analysis of ‘Near Misses’

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The upside of condition-based monitoring and digital control systems is that they are proactive in preventing failure but the downside is they frequently mask the cause of failures.

These near misses should be treated as failures and analysed as such.

It is important that every touch/visit/intervention on the equipment is recorded in the CMMS, e.g. trips and resets are not general duties for the electrical crew, they should be recorded as corrective work in the CMMS against the equipment involved. They are frequently an indicator of a problem elsewhere.

It is often impractical and there is a lot of resistance to raising a new work order in these instances for each return visit to the kit to reset, but the simple solution is to raise one corrective work order against the equipment and record each intervention against it until the problem is fixed. A failure problem/cause recorded as ‘Unknown’ should not be acceptable to supervisors/management looking for improvement.

CMMS – Building the ‘Big Picture’

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The Big Picture – to get the big picture of events over time you need to obtain and analyse a lot of data from a number of different sources, CMMS, condition monitoring, SCADA, DCS, Production reporting. It is always difficult to identify links between these different silos of information but the TIME dimension is certainly always one.

The data ‘is what it is’ and the CMMS is normally capable of recording what is needed but it is a fact that as more automated monitoring and control systems are added this data is recorded elsewhere and does not find its way back to the CMMS. This could be one reason why there are so few meter based PMs active, as this data is not directly recorded in the CMMS and so frequency based PMs are the norm. The technician cannot record what he no longer sees.

The big picture shows where we burn the most resources, most failures, lost production, hours, costs and helps identify the bad actors, whether they are machine or human. We can then improve data quality and business processes, repair, redesign, replace equipment with a business case based on evidence and monitor improvement. This is a powerful tool for changing behaviours which is the first step towards continuous improvement.

The BI-Cycle Plant Information Data Mart model delivers the ‘Big Picture’ for the continuous maintenance improvement process.

The Concept of NEGATIVE WORK

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There is a lot of interesting discussion and theory around staff resistance to maintenance program initiatives regarding buy-in, training and supporting the maintenance program, however I think the simple insight is that the Supervisors and Technicians have seen it all many times before. Hence the negativity.

Over the years they have survived new systems and business processes and watched management initiatives come and go. Most of which from their perspective increased their workload rather than reduced it.

The ‘Dilbert Principle’ comes into play – ‘If you’re a surgeon, it takes a great deal of skill and intelligence to perform an organ transplant. It is much less challenging to write a mission statement for the hospital that explains your deep desire to avoid killing patients accidentally.’ – Scott Adams

You don’t want the administrator performing heart bypass surgery on you.

I believe that to achieve ‘buy-in’ from the workforce to continuous maintenance improvement you have to  change management behaviour around the maintenance processes.

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‘Sticking to The Plan’ delivers double the work

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Management summary:
In 2007, BP’s Ravenspurn North and Cleeton platforms in the Southern North Sea (SNS) Gas assets transformed from a highly reactive to a more planned way of working (from 85% to 10% unscheduled activities). Now, with well coordinated workforces of 65 technicians on the two largest SNS Gas sites, these platforms are executing twice the amount of scheduled work with no additional personnel. Continue reading →