Knowledge Center: Asset Optimization
Plant Maintenance: People, Process, and Technology
As plant maintenance increasingly gravitates towards more sophisticated, proactive approaches, James Reyes-Picknell argues that in the race to get the latest technology, people and process are all too often neglected.
Maintenance is progressing from a state of “breakdown” towards increasingly more proactive approaches. In making that shift we are relying more and more heavily on technology to help us detect deterioration and failures, to respond automatically when they occur and even in the management of the maintenance function. While technology is a very helpful tool, it can be argued that it’s gone too far.
Companies the world over have recognized that maintenance is a key element in sustaining productive capacity. Maintenance has a product – it delivers uptime. When equipment breaks down there is no doubt about what to do – call maintenance and have the failure repaired. Restore the plant from the shut down and broken state to a fully operational and productive state and as quickly as possible. Downtime is expensive. Unplanned downtime is even worse for the business.
We’ve learned that “proactive” approaches to
maintenance work best. They enable us to minimize
the downtime (maximize uptime) at low cost. They
are also safer approaches because they are usually
less disruptive to operations and less intrusive into
the equipment itself.
There are three proactive approaches that are
used widely:
Preventive maintenance
Where equipment or systems are taken out of operation to deal with the adverse effects of aging and usage of the equipment. It is restored to as close to the “as new” condition as practical and usually on a fixed interval basis such as age, operating cycles, hours, km driven, volume produced, etc.
Preventive maintenance includes overhaul activities that are usually intrusive to the equipment and require scheduled downtime to accommodate the work. The frequency of these interventions is based on the “useful life” of the asset however it is measured in the circumstances.
An example of preventive maintenance is the regularly scheduled replacement of lubricants in engines. It is required to remove contaminants from combustion, wear particles and to restore lubricant properties that sustain efficient engine performance.
Predictive maintenance
Where the equipment is checked or inspected on a relatively frequent basis to look for signs of deterioration that can arise randomly. This is effective for dealing with failures that happen irregularly and therefore they don’t lend themselves to preventive maintenance based on a “useful life”; random failures can occur at any time.
The best we can do in these cases is to detect the failure after it has been initiated and before it has progressed to the point where we suffer unscheduled downtime. This identification of incipient failures gives time for action to be taken that will reduce the consequences of the failure, but not the failure itself.
Examples of predictive maintenance are regularly scheduled checks of vibrations, oil levels and bearing temperatures to see that they are all operating within normal operating parameters for the application. Most of the time all is well and predictive maintenance can seem to be finding nothing. The value of predictive maintenance becomes evident when we find a problem and avoid its otherwise severe consequences.
Detective maintenance
Where equipment or systems that are normally in the dormant state are tested periodically to ensure that they are still working and capable of functioning when needed. This is useful for alarm, shutdown, safety systems, warning signs, emergency, backup and standby equipment of all sorts.
Because these items are not normally needed to operate they can fall into disrepair and we don’t know about it until it’s too late. Testing at an appropriate test frequency won’t avoid the failures, but it gives us the opportunity to find the failures during a test rather than during a real emergency.
Like predictive maintenance it cannot avoid the failures – but it does reduce the risk of suffering the consequences. When a failure is discovered it can be corrected and a potentially dangerous situation has been avoided. Examples of detective maintenance are the regular testing of fire alarm systems, back- up pumping equipment, and pressure relief valves.
Technology aids
Technology is very useful to the maintenance world. Process instrumentation, control and monitoring signals can be used to tell us when failures occur or when equipment is simply not running up to standard.
For example, if the power required to drive a given pumping application at a fixed flow rate is increasing then it is a sign of pump deterioration (likely wear of internal components). Modern monitoring systems can use this information and trigger the generation of work requests to have the pumps internal dimensions checked and brought back to standard.
Other signals are used specifically to monitor equipment condition. Cylinder exhaust temperature readings on a diesel engine, for example, can tell us of uneven fuel injection, incomplete combustion, leaking cylinder valves, etc. Again, these readings can be automated and monitoring systems can be used to trigger appropriate maintenance intervention. In some cases voting logic systems are also used to reduce the frequency of “false alarms”.
Some monitoring is instrumented into the systems and runs continuously. Some is only used periodically and is not even hardwired into the systems being monitored. For example, few companies implement on-line vibration monitoring. It is expensive to install and maintain so most opt for portable monitoring equipment that can be used on all their equipment, only limited by where it can be physically set up for the taking of readings.
Even there, technology has come to the rescue – we now have portable data collectors that can upload information like the details of an entire vibration analysis route in a plant and then later download the data collected to a terminal where it is analyzed. Some vibration systems have the ability to perform analysis – sometimes quite complex – in the field.
On and off-line monitoring systems are very useful within the context of predictive maintenance. They help find defects that have begun to occur but haven’t yet progressed to the fully failed state. Should we get to the failed state, we also have production monitoring technology that will inform us.
Detective maintenance is a bit different because in this case it’s often the technology that is being checked for failures. For example, the weekly testing of a fire alarm warning system is actually a check of the technology used to monitor and annunciate an alarm condition. Often the checks are initiated and carried out manually to ensure the technology is working.
Technology limits
Hence there is a blend of technologies, including good old fashioned manual work, that supports the different proactive maintenance tactical approaches. In fact these systems for monitoring, checking and testing have become so common today that we have grown to rely on them. In most cases we simply trust that they work and often we don’t even both to ask, “how?”
Electronic technology is designed with such high levels of reliability that we’ve grown accustomed to it just working. If you have ever looked for car parts in a scrap yard you’ll know that often the radios are still working long after the car has fallen into disuse!
To a degree we’ve become numb to technology at the same time as becoming highly reliant on it. And this is where it can be argued that we’ve gone too far. We are taking it for granted that our technology will always work – and yet there remains a risk, albeit small, that it won’t. Electronics also fails us from time to time and usually it does so randomly.
Preventive maintenance doesn’t work for electronic systems and predictive techniques rarely work because there is so little warning time from the detection of a fault developing to it full manifestation as a failure. Detective maintenance only applies (and works) where there is a dormant system and again, it doesn’t avoid failures, it only reduces their consequences.
This numbness to technology can be very evident in younger generations who have grown up with more complex technology than their parents, who remain slightly skeptical and therefore more watchful for signs of technology failure. For example, when I first used electronic calculators in university I didn’t really understand how they worked and used to check their results using a slide rule!
Those who are entering our workforces today have simply not experienced much in the way of technology failure so they are often caught very much by surprise when it does fail. They don’t know how either the slide rule or the calculator work but they expect the calculator to work.
Not so easy
Technology in everyday life has thus become pervasive, very easy to use, as well as reliable. The effort that’s been put into creating ease of use in consumer products has seldom been done for industrial equipment. For a variety of good reasons, technology in our plants tends to lag developments in consumer goods.
Among those reasons are the need to meet electrical classifications for safe use in more hazardous environments, plus the technology must be robust in the physical sense since it will likely be used heavily by a variety of different users, none of whom owns the item and all of whom know it can be repaired or replaced without impacting their own wallet.
Not all employees abuse equipment by their handling of it, but some do and the equipment must be able to continue working after suffering that heavy and sometimes abusive treatment. Consequently, industrial technology tends to come packaged heavily and in less user-friendly formats. It’s the latter that leads to disuse or lack-of-use of the technology.
We expect our electronics to be easy to use. Few of us truly read technical manuals – we go to the “quick start” page, follow a few instructions and play with the device from that point onwards to learn of its additional features. Intuitively we think that if this works at home then why not at work? And it gets us into trouble.
We seldom truly learn how to use our technology as it is intended. In our work with clients doing reliability centered maintenance (RCM) we find that they always discover something new about their systems (both high and low tech systems) that they didn’t know before the analysis began. There are features and capabilities that go unused. The IT world hasn’t missed this either.
Enterprise asset management (EAM), computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software companies are helping their customers to get more value from their installed systems. This often entails using the functionality they have already turned on, correctly and then turning on additional functionality that they’ve already bought but not implemented.
In conjunction with this is an effort to match system capabilities with business processes. Often we find that the technology is falling into disuse because it is cumbersome to use and even well-designed business processes then fall into disuse and chaos creeps in. One could even argue that the second law of thermodynamics applies to electronic computing systems in our companies today.
Missing opportunities
We are not putting the required energy into training and user friendliness of our systems to ensure they get used and used correctly. We are therefore missing opportunities.
One system supplier in North America estimated that an additional 10 percent productivity can be gained from simply using the capability of systems already installed. In our experience we’d certainly agree with that and might even put the figure higher. A great deal of energy is expended working around user-hostile or poorly understood systems and/or poorly designed business processes.
Not only do we get inefficient use of our technology, we expend energy in working around it. Our lack of understanding of how to get the most from our technology has led to misuse and abuse of it and to missed opportunity for our businesses.
We find that many of our clients today have a dizzying array of technology at their disposal and that there is always some of it, sometimes a lot of it, that is under utilized or being misapplied – almost always because the technology itself, how to use it, what it can and cannot do are not fully understood.
The lack of user friendliness is a factor, but in our opinion it is being used as an excuse to hide the lack of understanding. We all do it too – whenever we can’t get something to work we have a tendency to blame the technology before we ever look at ourselves.
So technology has, to some degree, exceeded our ability and capability to utilize it effectively. But why is that so?
Programmers of software systems, electronic engineers and suppliers of these technologies are all trying hard to sell us new product. They continue to add features and capabilities well beyond what we have demonstrated that we can use today. Yet those new features always seem to be something good – something we would even use (if we could).
So we feed that cycle of technology development by buying more of it. And the more we buy the more the developers continue to produce new technology. This cycle is very good for the business of those who supply the technology, being well versed as they are in the old adage, “if you build it they will come”. And we are addicted to taking the easy solution – we have convinced ourselves that technology provides those easy solutions. Yet it doesn’t – not really.
We have a choice. We can continue to buy the new technology and use only a fraction of its capability or we can get the most out of what we’ve already bought. Give up on the easy solutions – after all, they aren’t working yet. It’s time for a new choice. When the old methods don’t work any more then it’s time to change what we are doing and select a new direction.
People & process
We find that the direction most beneficial is to focus on the other two elements required to get technology working well. Just as a fire requires fuel, oxygen and heat, results for our business require the right combination of Technology, People, Process.
For the most part we have the technology part of this already. This is especially so in newer installations today.
People need training in how best to use the technology. Often this is done for the introduction of new technology even in older installations but it is seldom sustained as the technology ages. Upgrade, update and refresher training are not that common.
The business processes must be right for the business and the technology must fit the process – not the other way around. Don’t modify business processes to match what a computer system can do. Find a system that accommodates your ways of working or modify it to fit. The larger, more capable enterprise systems that many companies have already moved to have the flexibility to be used the way you want them to work. We are not forced into processes that the software company suggests.
Many (but certainly not all) implementation consultants often have only a limited level of system knowledge. If they are younger consultants they will also tend to have a limited level of experience in using various business processes.
Consequently, new systems are sometimes implemented with only minimum capability turned on. That’s done in part so that users can get used to it, but sometimes the implementation team is under pressure to deliver to a schedule and leaves out what otherwise might be turned on.
In most cases however, it’s rare that the additional capability that was intentionally left unused, gets turned on later. By the time users are comfortable with the new system, the budget for training, or the implementation budget is gone, so we live with only partially implemented systems.
There is often a big gap here that technology cannot fill – it’s up to us to look for the process and people issues that may be cause us to underutilize the vast capability of the systems and technology we have at our disposal.
For more information Please visit Honeywell website at www.honeywell.com/ps/sea
As plant maintenance increasingly gravitates towards more sophisticated, proactive approaches, James Reyes-Picknell argues that in the race to get the latest technology, people and process are all too often neglected.
Maintenance is progressing from a state of “breakdown” towards increasingly more proactive approaches. In making that shift we are relying more and more heavily on technology to help us detect deterioration and failures, to respond automatically when they occur and even in the management of the maintenance function. While technology is a very helpful tool, it can be argued that it’s gone too far.
Companies the world over have recognized that maintenance is a key element in sustaining productive capacity. Maintenance has a product – it delivers uptime. When equipment breaks down there is no doubt about what to do – call maintenance and have the failure repaired. Restore the plant from the shut down and broken state to a fully operational and productive state and as quickly as possible. Downtime is expensive. Unplanned downtime is even worse for the business.
We’ve learned that “proactive” approaches to maintenance work best. They enable us to minimize the downtime (maximize uptime) at low cost. They are also safer approaches because they are usually less disruptive to operations and less intrusive into the equipment itself.
There are three proactive approaches that are used widely:
Preventive maintenance
Where equipment or systems are taken out of operation to deal with the adverse effects of aging and usage of the equipment. It is restored to as close to the “as new” condition as practical and usually on a fixed interval basis such as age, operating cycles, hours, km driven, volume produced, etc.
Preventive maintenance includes overhaul activities that are usually intrusive to the equipment and require scheduled downtime to accommodate the work. The frequency of these interventions is based on the “useful life” of the asset however it is measured in the circumstances.
An example of preventive maintenance is the regularly scheduled replacement of lubricants in engines. It is required to remove contaminants from combustion, wear particles and to restore lubricant properties that sustain efficient engine performance.
Predictive maintenance
Where the equipment is checked or inspected on a relatively frequent basis to look for signs of deterioration that can arise randomly. This is effective for dealing with failures that happen irregularly and therefore they don’t lend themselves to preventive maintenance based on a “useful life”; random failures can occur at any time.
The best we can do in these cases is to detect the failure after it has been initiated and before it has progressed to the point where we suffer unscheduled downtime. This identification of incipient failures gives time for action to be taken that will reduce the consequences of the failure, but not the failure itself.
Examples of predictive maintenance are regularly scheduled checks of vibrations, oil levels and bearing temperatures to see that they are all operating within normal operating parameters for the application. Most of the time all is well and predictive maintenance can seem to be finding nothing. The value of predictive maintenance becomes evident when we find a problem and avoid its otherwise severe consequences.
Detective maintenance
Where equipment or systems that are normally in the dormant state are tested periodically to ensure that they are still working and capable of functioning when needed. This is useful for alarm, shutdown, safety systems, warning signs, emergency, backup and standby equipment of all sorts.
Because these items are not normally needed to operate they can fall into disrepair and we don’t know about it until it’s too late. Testing at an appropriate test frequency won’t avoid the failures, but it gives us the opportunity to find the failures during a test rather than during a real emergency.
Like predictive maintenance it cannot avoid the failures – but it does reduce the risk of suffering the consequences. When a failure is discovered it can be corrected and a potentially dangerous situation has been avoided. Examples of detective maintenance are the regular testing of fire alarm systems, back- up pumping equipment, and pressure relief valves.
Technology aids
Technology is very useful to the maintenance world. Process instrumentation, control and monitoring signals can be used to tell us when failures occur or when equipment is simply not running up to standard.
For example, if the power required to drive a given pumping application at a fixed flow rate is increasing then it is a sign of pump deterioration (likely wear of internal components). Modern monitoring systems can use this information and trigger the generation of work requests to have the pumps internal dimensions checked and brought back to standard.
Other signals are used specifically to monitor equipment condition. Cylinder exhaust temperature readings on a diesel engine, for example, can tell us of uneven fuel injection, incomplete combustion, leaking cylinder valves, etc. Again, these readings can be automated and monitoring systems can be used to trigger appropriate maintenance intervention. In some cases voting logic systems are also used to reduce the frequency of “false alarms”.
Some monitoring is instrumented into the systems and runs continuously. Some is only used periodically and is not even hardwired into the systems being monitored. For example, few companies implement on-line vibration monitoring. It is expensive to install and maintain so most opt for portable monitoring equipment that can be used on all their equipment, only limited by where it can be physically set up for the taking of readings.
Even there, technology has come to the rescue – we now have portable data collectors that can upload information like the details of an entire vibration analysis route in a plant and then later download the data collected to a terminal where it is analyzed. Some vibration systems have the ability to perform analysis – sometimes quite complex – in the field.
On and off-line monitoring systems are very useful within the context of predictive maintenance. They help find defects that have begun to occur but haven’t yet progressed to the fully failed state. Should we get to the failed state, we also have production monitoring technology that will inform us.
Detective maintenance is a bit different because in this case it’s often the technology that is being checked for failures. For example, the weekly testing of a fire alarm warning system is actually a check of the technology used to monitor and annunciate an alarm condition. Often the checks are initiated and carried out manually to ensure the technology is working.
Technology limits
Hence there is a blend of technologies, including good old fashioned manual work, that supports the different proactive maintenance tactical approaches. In fact these systems for monitoring, checking and testing have become so common today that we have grown to rely on them. In most cases we simply trust that they work and often we don’t even both to ask, “how?”
Electronic technology is designed with such high levels of reliability that we’ve grown accustomed to it just working. If you have ever looked for car parts in a scrap yard you’ll know that often the radios are still working long after the car has fallen into disuse!
To a degree we’ve become numb to technology at the same time as becoming highly reliant on it. And this is where it can be argued that we’ve gone too far. We are taking it for granted that our technology will always work – and yet there remains a risk, albeit small, that it won’t. Electronics also fails us from time to time and usually it does so randomly.
Preventive maintenance doesn’t work for electronic systems and predictive techniques rarely work because there is so little warning time from the detection of a fault developing to it full manifestation as a failure. Detective maintenance only applies (and works) where there is a dormant system and again, it doesn’t avoid failures, it only reduces their consequences.
This numbness to technology can be very evident in younger generations who have grown up with more complex technology than their parents, who remain slightly skeptical and therefore more watchful for signs of technology failure. For example, when I first used electronic calculators in university I didn’t really understand how they worked and used to check their results using a slide rule!
Those who are entering our workforces today have simply not experienced much in the way of technology failure so they are often caught very much by surprise when it does fail. They don’t know how either the slide rule or the calculator work but they expect the calculator to work.
Not so easy
Technology in everyday life has thus become pervasive, very easy to use, as well as reliable. The effort that’s been put into creating ease of use in consumer products has seldom been done for industrial equipment. For a variety of good reasons, technology in our plants tends to lag developments in consumer goods.
Among those reasons are the need to meet electrical classifications for safe use in more hazardous environments, plus the technology must be robust in the physical sense since it will likely be used heavily by a variety of different users, none of whom owns the item and all of whom know it can be repaired or replaced without impacting their own wallet.
Not all employees abuse equipment by their handling of it, but some do and the equipment must be able to continue working after suffering that heavy and sometimes abusive treatment. Consequently, industrial technology tends to come packaged heavily and in less user-friendly formats. It’s the latter that leads to disuse or lack-of-use of the technology.
We expect our electronics to be easy to use. Few of us truly read technical manuals – we go to the “quick start” page, follow a few instructions and play with the device from that point onwards to learn of its additional features. Intuitively we think that if this works at home then why not at work? And it gets us into trouble.
We seldom truly learn how to use our technology as it is intended. In our work with clients doing reliability centered maintenance (RCM) we find that they always discover something new about their systems (both high and low tech systems) that they didn’t know before the analysis began. There are features and capabilities that go unused. The IT world hasn’t missed this either.
Enterprise asset management (EAM), computerized maintenance management systems (CMMS) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software companies are helping their customers to get more value from their installed systems. This often entails using the functionality they have already turned on, correctly and then turning on additional functionality that they’ve already bought but not implemented.
In conjunction with this is an effort to match system capabilities with business processes. Often we find that the technology is falling into disuse because it is cumbersome to use and even well-designed business processes then fall into disuse and chaos creeps in. One could even argue that the second law of thermodynamics applies to electronic computing systems in our companies today.
Missing opportunities
We are not putting the required energy into training and user friendliness of our systems to ensure they get used and used correctly. We are therefore missing opportunities.
One system supplier in North America estimated that an additional 10 percent productivity can be gained from simply using the capability of systems already installed. In our experience we’d certainly agree with that and might even put the figure higher. A great deal of energy is expended working around user-hostile or poorly understood systems and/or poorly designed business processes.
Not only do we get inefficient use of our technology, we expend energy in working around it. Our lack of understanding of how to get the most from our technology has led to misuse and abuse of it and to missed opportunity for our businesses.
We find that many of our clients today have a dizzying array of technology at their disposal and that there is always some of it, sometimes a lot of it, that is under utilized or being misapplied – almost always because the technology itself, how to use it, what it can and cannot do are not fully understood.
The lack of user friendliness is a factor, but in our opinion it is being used as an excuse to hide the lack of understanding. We all do it too – whenever we can’t get something to work we have a tendency to blame the technology before we ever look at ourselves.
So technology has, to some degree, exceeded our ability and capability to utilize it effectively. But why is that so?
Programmers of software systems, electronic engineers and suppliers of these technologies are all trying hard to sell us new product. They continue to add features and capabilities well beyond what we have demonstrated that we can use today. Yet those new features always seem to be something good – something we would even use (if we could).
So we feed that cycle of technology development by buying more of it. And the more we buy the more the developers continue to produce new technology. This cycle is very good for the business of those who supply the technology, being well versed as they are in the old adage, “if you build it they will come”. And we are addicted to taking the easy solution – we have convinced ourselves that technology provides those easy solutions. Yet it doesn’t – not really.
We have a choice. We can continue to buy the new technology and use only a fraction of its capability or we can get the most out of what we’ve already bought. Give up on the easy solutions – after all, they aren’t working yet. It’s time for a new choice. When the old methods don’t work any more then it’s time to change what we are doing and select a new direction.
People & process
We find that the direction most beneficial is to focus on the other two elements required to get technology working well. Just as a fire requires fuel, oxygen and heat, results for our business require the right combination of Technology, People, Process.
For the most part we have the technology part of this already. This is especially so in newer installations today.
People need training in how best to use the technology. Often this is done for the introduction of new technology even in older installations but it is seldom sustained as the technology ages. Upgrade, update and refresher training are not that common.
The business processes must be right for the business and the technology must fit the process – not the other way around. Don’t modify business processes to match what a computer system can do. Find a system that accommodates your ways of working or modify it to fit. The larger, more capable enterprise systems that many companies have already moved to have the flexibility to be used the way you want them to work. We are not forced into processes that the software company suggests.
Many (but certainly not all) implementation consultants often have only a limited level of system knowledge. If they are younger consultants they will also tend to have a limited level of experience in using various business processes.
Consequently, new systems are sometimes implemented with only minimum capability turned on. That’s done in part so that users can get used to it, but sometimes the implementation team is under pressure to deliver to a schedule and leaves out what otherwise might be turned on.
In most cases however, it’s rare that the additional capability that was intentionally left unused, gets turned on later. By the time users are comfortable with the new system, the budget for training, or the implementation budget is gone, so we live with only partially implemented systems.
There is often a big gap here that technology cannot fill – it’s up to us to look for the process and people issues that may be cause us to underutilize the vast capability of the systems and technology we have at our disposal.
For more information Please visit Honeywell website at www.honeywell.com/ps/sea
