One of the clients we are working with had a visit from the HSA. They asked for a list of all the “Safety Critical Components”, how they were identified and what maintenance was carried out on them. By components, they mean everything including Estops, interlocks, Pressure Relief Valves – you name it.

Senior HSA inspector, John Colreavy is quoted as follows in a recent article in Health and Safety Review;

Reflecting on the causes of maintenance accidents, John Colreavy first speaks about accidents that happen when equipment is being maintained. He highlights the importance of machine guarding, relating it to “the whole procedure for handing machinery over for maintenance and then taking it back into use”. He mentions the need for permit to work systems and isolation procedures and the possible need to have lock-out systems. He says problems can arise when equipment is being handed back. Often, he says, there is a “failure to replace guards after maintenance”. That can, he adds, be a matter of supervision.

Another issue, one which has been identified from the reports the Authority receives from plant inspectors in respect of steam boilers and air receivers is, Colreavy says, the issue of corrosion. Often inspection reports show “corrosion due to failure, in the case of steam boilers, to properly treat water and failure to drain water from the bottom of air receivers”. Such failures are both a safety issue and can lead to “expensive repair” bills.

Stressing the importance of record keeping, Colreavy says records can be used as “a feedback mechanism”. He adds that “if something keeps on breaking down, it may be symptomatic of a greater problem”.

Below is what happened to one employer who didn’t keep records:
No records
An employer who had not kept maintenance records was unsuccessful in defending a personal injuries claim brought by an employee. The court heard that the worker suffered a thumb injury when a nail from a nail gun became embedded in his thumb. One of the issues in the case was whether maintenance records were kept. The employer claimed the gun was maintained, but had not kept records. Saying that on the evidence it was a difficult case to decide, Judge Alice Doyle noted that no records had been produced in court. She awarded the injured worker €8,000 damages. (For detailed report see HSR, January/February 2009, pg18)

Highlighting their legal obligations, John Colreavy mentions a number of practical actions employers should take:

• Guards should be replaced
• Access to manuals for machines should be available and manufacturers’ guidelines should be followed
• If modifications are being carried out, they should be risk assessed and care should be taken to ensure the modifications do not invalidate the manufacturer’s safety assessment
• Employers should have preventative maintenance programmes in place to prevent breakdowns.     

 As a matter of good practice, he suggests keeping a register of items which are “critical to the safety of plant”.

 A particular danger inspectors come across during the course of inspections is where interlocks are over-ridden and defeated. It is a practice he warns against. 

Q: Can you show records for the maintenance work that you do??

We are working with a company at the moment who have done great work in getting all their spares sorted out and are now going to put them all up on their EAM system and link them to the work orders. Yes, the cynics would  say that this should be standard practice for every company, not even good or best practice and they’d be right. It is very positive though that they have put the work in to getting back control.

So, all movements, be they stock items or Direct Purchases or Contractor Items will now be linked to a work order. The engineering managers will now be able to confidently look up the on line stock catalogue and only schedule in work when spares are in stock. Cuts down on loads of hours “checking to see if it is in the store”  by going in there and rooting around and getting frustrated!!

Instruction from Finance – all stock will be entered into the system at a zero value .  That will mean that any cost reports run on spares won’t be of any value. Any other implications of putting in all the stock at zero value first day?

The cost of unreliability includes all costs resulting in any manner from poor reliability.

Came across this two pronged approach to determining what all these costs actually are. (Interesting that the approach includes ”Top Down, Bottom Up” - I first came across this expression in the Business Centred Maintenance Methodology from Tony Kelly at the University of Manchester.

High Level Cost of Unreliability

Trying to understand the total loss of money that results from poor reliability. We want to assess the cost as senior managers, accountants, or investors would. They are not particularly interested in what is causing the loss of revenue. They are only interested the bottom line.

The first category of Costs of Unreliability is direct costs, which are those factors that have a direct cause-and-effect relationship with a reliability event.

These costs include:

• The value of lost production – or the income that could have been made if production had not been interrupted.

• The cost of maintenance needed to perform repairs and restore operation.

The second category of Costs of Unreliability is indirect costs.

These costs frequently have no direct cause-and -effect relationship, but are the result of poor reliability nonetheless.

These costs include:

• The cost of being a reactive organization – or the cost of having to be prepared to respond to failures. An organization that performs a great deal of reactive maintenance needs to be larger than a proactive organization. It needs people both to keep things running and to respond to failures. It needs a larger staff to manage all the problems.  Managing problems keeps senior managers from focusing on future improvement and keeps them focused on the past.

• The costs of sloppiness – sloppiness is impossible to confine to one thing. It is impossible to confine a management philosophy that condones poor reliability to reliability only.

Poor reliability tends to infect other areas like quality, safety, and environmental performance. In assessing the Cost of Unreliability, it is important to include the impact poor reliability has on those areas.

• The cost of lost business – or the impact on your business from missing deliveries or making poor products while affected by poor reliability. Companies that accept poor reliability have two choices. First, their production and quality can suffer from poor reliability. If they want to prevent their poor reliability from affecting delivery schedule and quality, they have to have sufficient manufacturing capacity to both accommodate the losses and meet customer demands.

Second, they can have an inefficient operation that ultimately affects product costs. In either case, the customer will ultimately be unhappy and look for another supplier.

Detailed Cost of Unreliability

In assessing the Cost of Unreliability from a bottom-up or inside-out perspective, we will be trying to identify each and every issue that results in poor reliability and to quantify the relative value of that specific problem. Although the accountants and investors are not interested in this level of detail, this information is needed to build a plan of attack for corrective action. It is important to understand specifically what weakness is resulting in poor reliability and how large an impact is being produced. To be effective in making changes, we need to know what to attack and in which order we should attack each problem.

This article was excerpted from Reliability Assessment: A Guide To Aligning Expectations, Practices, and Performance by Daniel T. Daley (Courtesy Industrial Press

I never used to hear about companies wanting to hire Reliability Engineers here in Ireland until two to three years ago. Now, it is becoming more prevalent and I’ve come across some widely varying definitions of what the role is about too. Donald Ray of LCE reckons that one of the most fundamental aspects of what a RE does is is to track the production losses and abnormally high maintenance cost assets, then find ways to reduce those losses or high costs.
These losses are prioritized to focus efforts on the largest/most critical opportunities. The Reliability Engineer (in full partnership with the operations team) develops a plan to eliminate or reduce the losses through root cause analysis, obtains approval of the plan and facilitates the implementation.

I’d say he’s not far off the mark there - facilitating the implementation (i.e managing CHANGE can often be the toughest part!!) . In his approach is he in danger of focussing on Acute Downtime only and perhaps not on the Chronic Downtime?

Anybody agree these are the top eight reasons why our PM programs don’t always deliver?

1)Lack of Management Support
2) Lack of Maintenance Skills
3) Wrong Equipment Selected
4) No Changing/Updating PMs
5) Poor Schedule Compliance
6) Insufficient Detail on PM Sheets
7) Data Not Being Recorded
Lack of Understanding of EPA, OSHA, ISO Regulations

Met Terry Wireman at the MEETA -Irish Maintenance Society in Dublin last year and he reckoned they were the top eight.
Could there be another one?
Lack of buy in from the people actually doing the work?

These are contracts between functional areas of the plant which have an effect on overall reliability. I came across a study recently which claims that departments affect reliability in the following %
Sales (15%), Production (23%), Maintenance(17%), Procurement (12%), Plant Engineering (22%) and Management(11%).
Wow. How did they figure that out?
Anyone working with a company where there are such agreements in place between internal departments AND they aren’t ignored the first time there is a problem??

(Study was done by the RM Group in co-operation from the Reliabilty Manufacturing Association)

Happy New Year and ….Regulations – who cares?

We’re pretty anti-regulations here in Ireland. (Just look at the number of people still driving around talking into their mobile phones).

In maintenance, our anti-establishment leanings come to the fore particularly around audit time. We are pleased when we have managed to scrape through a particular issue or (better again) pulled the wool over the auditors eyes. I’m not saying its right but……can those who are without sin please stand up now??!!

The regulators/auditors are getting better though.

And the reality is that the regulators of our businesses are focussing more and more on maintenance.

At a recent get together with fellow maintenance managers, all from the Pharma/Healthcare side of manufacturing, all the talk was of how much more the auditors were scrutinising us in maintenance.

Regular questions asked were:

Can I see your backlog please? I mean your maintenance backlog. I want to see what maintenance tasks were not carried out.

Please provide me with a list of equipment failures in the last 1 month, 3 months, etc etc. I want to see what you have done about ensuring these failures don’t reoccur.

Can I see all your deviations in the last year.

A comment from one attendee ” They have drilled down through all the quality and validation stuff for years – now they are coming after us” .

We can’t let our guard down!!- read this …………..

A stark reminder of one of the cold hard facts behind why we need to keep adequate records on maintenance we do to our machines.

Just this month, a company down in Munster had a failure on one of their machines. They found it necessary to claim from their insurance company.  Wasn’t massive money involved – around the €30k mark – still significant though!!

Fact: Insurance company refused to pay out, citing the Law!!

The Law ( Chapter 2, Section 31 of SI 229 of 2007, Safety, Health and Wefare at Work, General Application Regulations) states:

” throughout its working life equipment is kept, by means of adequate maintenance, at a level such that it complies with the provisions of this chapter” and

” a maintenance log for any machine is kept up to date”

We all know that every aspect of every cost is being scrutinised. Is this the insurance companies “get tough” policy and how they are trying to keep their costs down? They are obviously scrutinising every claim much, much more.

Repeat: They refused to pay out, citing inadequate maintenance records.

Message is pretty clear isn’t it?  We should be keeping and using these records for analysis so that we can improve our maintenance.

If nothing else, we need these records for another critical reason too – keeping our Insurance valid!!

Have you fallen into the trap of trying to improve plant performance by simply throwing more money at maintenance? It doesn’t work. A benchmarking study of maintenance activities at over 130 plants around the world has confirmed what many of us suspected: increased maintenance expenditure on labour, spares and contractors pushes up the direct costs but the cost of downtime doesn’t go away. However, by implementing successful practices throughout your organisation, plant performance will be increased and costs reduced. In our study, the plants with the lowest maintenance costs also had the lowest downtime figures.

Don’t believe those people who say maintenance benchmarking is impossible because of the need to compare tangibles such as labour costs with intangibles such as plant downtime costs. The Stock Markets of the world benchmark hundreds of thousands of companies every day taking into account tangible and intangible factors.

Since 1991 we have been involved in a benchmarking exercise with world-wide organisations which wanted to reduce downtime. Some of the results were surprising such as very little correlation between cost and age of plant or cost and output quantity. However, even in a well-managed Fortune 500 organisation, the cost of poor maintenance practices was over 5% of turnover. This figure is not an artificial pipe dream: it was derived by comparing the performance and costs of the best in class plants with those of the organisation as a whole. The breakdown of excess costs was as follows:

Please note these are excess costs: the difference between downtime costs for best in class plants and average plants was 2.1% of turnover and so on.

Is the cost of poor practices as low as this in your organisation? It could be much higher. In any event, a figure of the order of 5% of turnover is comparable to the total profit and it surely cannot be ignored!

The keys to low cost and high performance were found to be:

• a defined strategy and mission linked to the business needs;
• focused preventive and predictive maintenance on critical equipment;
• a reliance on skills and training and not on excess resources;
• shared maintenance responsibility with production;
• performance measures for goal setting and improvement;
• upper management support for the above.

Many benchmarking initiatives stop with a report detailing what improvements need to be made. The next crucial step is missed out: providing the tools to help everyone make the improvements. Given that maintenance people are busy the world over, we produced a combination of distance learning tools and face to face training. Plants themselves were left to decide what mix was most appropriate for their particular circumstances. Distance learning tools included newsletters, case studies of successful practices and a practical manual describing the very latest thinking in tools and techniques for maintenance such as how best to set up an inventory management system or carry out a criticality analysis. Face to face training covered all aspects of maintenance management and highlighted the lessons learned from the benchmarking exercise.

The whole benchmarking process is shown in the diagram below. The circular format emphasises a feedback loop and its integration into a continuous improvement philosophy.

Has the benchmarking initiative been successful? Very definitely yes. What started out as a pilot programme on four plants now covers 130 sites around the world. People continue to join it voluntarily rather than being compelled to take part. It is on-going with a different emphasis every year. The data has been used to establish the cost of poor practices on a site by site basis and world-wide and to set priorities for the various improvement projects. Benefits are now coming through in the corporate results: just one particular site has achieved the following by implementing best practices:

• downtime has reduced from 8% to 5%;
• throughput has increased by 65%;
• profitability has risen by 50%.

The value which maintenance adds to an organisation can be obscure. Benchmarking helps to put this value on the map by producing realistic, achievable measures which can be used to drive performance improvement programmes. Are you making the most use of it?

Paul Wheelhouse