Research - White Papers
Safety Systems
Safety Engineering Management – SafetyPoint
Covaris Pty Ltd
PO Box 3456
Bankstown Square NSW 2200
Summary: The Covaris Safety Engineering Management is an established system based on the Australian and International Standards and engineering best practice in safety engineering. It enables the systematic examination of the hazards associated with plant and machinery, leading to a documented safety improvement scheme and an ultimately safer workplace.
Asset Management
Covaris Pty Ltd
www.covaris.com.au
Covaris White Paper - Asset Management ver 1-0.doc 1
Asset Management Implementation
Covaris Pty Ltd
PO Box 3456
Bankstown Square NSW 2200
Summary: This paper presents various methodologies and issues associated with a total asset management process that embraces the use of capital and maintenance expenditure to ensure assets meet the full spectrum of operational requirements, including safety, performance and return on investment. Pervading the entire process is a risk management process that is a function of the condition of the asset base and the responsiveness to identified needs. Output from the asset management plan described in the paper includes distribution of costs across systems and areas, efficiency of the expenditure (including reactive versus proactive maintenance plus anecdotal notes on known problems), and effectiveness of the expenditure – management of the reliability and capability of the systems, where capability represents ability of an asset to provide its intended function with expected levels of flexibility, efficiency and quality.
Maintenance Bureau
Covaris Pty Ltd
www.covaris.com.au
Covaris White Paper - Maintenance Bureau ver 1-0.doc 1
Maintenance Reliability Bureau
Covaris Pty Ltd
PO Box 3456
Bankstown Square NSW 2200
Summary: This paper presents an objective methodology for maintenance data analysis. The purposes of these analyses are to identify strengths and weaknesses in the maintenance management system, opportunities for improvements, and benchmark maintenance key elements against maintenance best practice. A wide range of reports can be provided from analysing the data from computerised maintenance management systems. These reports can be categorised as Performance Reports, Benchmarking Reports, Optimisation Reports, and Data Integrity Reports. Failure Modes and Effect Analysis is one of the main outcomes of the maintenance engineering bureau services. This analysis is an easy to use and yet powerful, proactive maintenance engineering method, which can identify potential failure modes, determine their effect on the maintenance costs, and identify actions to mitigate the failures. The results of the analyses of the various maintenance system data sets based on the developed methodology are presented.
Maintenance Systems
Covaris Pty Ltd
www.covaris.com.au
Covaris White Paper - Maintenance Systems Formation ver 1-0.doc 1
Maintenance Systems Formation
Covaris Pty Ltd
PO Box 3456
Bankstown Square NSW 2200
Summary: The major topics dealt with in this paper include identification of items to be maintained under a preventative maintenance schedule (PM) in a facility and the assessment of the criticality of each of the nominated items of plant. Based on the asset listing a preventative maintenance schedule and inspection plan, covering simple inspection, trade level overhaul tasks and condition monitoring tasks may be established. Supporting the schedule are requirements for sub-contractor agreements and services, and statutory registers. Where possible recommendations on critical spares holdings and best practice maintenance policies should be supplied. The whole process is managed with a planning and scheduling approach, and measured by KPIs for reporting maintenance performance.
Research - Papers
Strategic Asset Management:
Dr. R.A. Platfoot
Covaris Pty Ltd
Summary: This paper presents various methodologies and issues associated with a total asset management process that embraces the use of capital and maintenance expenditure to ensure assets meet the full spectrum of operational requirements, including safety, performance and return on investment. Pervading the entire process is a risk management process that is a function of the condition of the asset base and the responsiveness to identified needs. The tangibles of the asset management plan are physical documents and systems that make up the individual elements within the framework. In this case, they are the outward signs of a business process, which is comprised of many business rules. A mixture of Oracle, intranet and Office-based documents will be described, including how these are interleaved. Output from the asset management plan described in the paper includes distribution of costs across systems and areas, efficiency of the expenditure (including reactive versus proactive maintenance plus anecdotal notes on known problems), and effectiveness of the expenditure – management of the reliability and capability of the systems, where capability represents ability of an asset to provide its intended function with expected levels of flexibility, efficiency and quality. In conclusion this work has achieved interpretation of the broad overall business targets in terms of operational requirements for specific assets and groups of assets, planning ahead to check likelihood of asset capability being able to meet operational requirements, and gap analysis between operational requirements and operational performance.
Strategy - Maintenance, Capital and Risk
STRATEGY – MAINTENANCE, CAPITAL AND RISK
Summary: This paper presents various methodologies and issues associated with a total asset management process that embraces the use of capital and maintenance expenditure to ensure assets meet the full spectrum of operational requirements, including safety, performance and return on investment. The broad range of issues associated with implementing asset management mean that the work must be conducted within a cohesive framework, even though different elements may have little in common with each other. Pervading the entire process is a risk management process that is a function of the condition of the asset base and the responsiveness to identified needs.
Maintenance Systems:
Improving Return from Maintenance
This paper is a contribution to the principal issues in formulating maintenance strategy and the integration of resources to conducting a wide range of tasks. The strategy relies on the implementation of rigorous systems and the use of information technology for decision support. An aspect of maintenance support is value add work where asset performance is to be enhanced through related studies, such as the case in this paper which focuses on the exploitation of inspection data and life forecasting.
Informed Maintenance Planning
R.A. Platfoot
University of New South Wales
Sydney NSW 2052
The starting point for improving maintenance planning is the establishment of a maintenance policy which embraces a work flow system, various techniques in monitoring reliability and work practices, and anticipates plant problems rather than reacts to them. This means that the company has a commitment to sustaining an information base which requires accurate data collection, effective management and timely disbursement of reports. The planning has to be reasonable, considering the level of available resources and the speed with which they may be dispatched.
Research - Papers - Maintenance Systems :
Maintenance Audits
R.A. Platfoot
Covaris Pty Ltd
This paper is intended to provide the reader with the basic understanding of necessary techniques to conduct an internal review of maintenance effectiveness. The technique of information mapping is described, which is intended to assist with analysing internal relationships or relationships between operations client and maintenance service provider. The need for a quantitative approach for the audit is described and a simple five point ranking is discussed with case study examples
Maintenance Improvement Strategies
R.A. Platfoot
University of New South Wales
Sydney NSW 2052
A maintenance improvement strategy is presented in this paper which has been applied in a number of companies, with each of its elements tested for individual effectiveness and for its contribution to the whole program. It focuses on two key issues: the operations/maintenance interface, and the need for detailed technical information on the condition of equipment to optimise maintenance decision making. The strategy has three early elements: an audit, a workshop for combined operations and maintenance personnel and a preliminary roll-out of tasks. The strategy fits within a cohesive model which has three principal lobes: condition-based maintenance, strategic planning and optimisation for operations scheduling
MANAGING THE PARTNERSHIP BETWEEN SERVICE PROVIDER AND CLIENT FOR MAXIMUM RESULTS
Dr. R A Platfoot
Covaris Pty Ltd
Summary: This paper summarises recent experiences in developing effective working relationships between clients and the contracted maintenance service providers. The work is drawn across a range of industries including manufacturing, utilities and facilities, with remarkably similar issues being common to all. The emphasis on improvement requires three key attributes in the day-to-day working relationship: a vision for improvement, resource plans to achieve the goals set, and clear measurements that mark progress. It is also necessary to appreciate that in this arrangement, the client organisation has a clear responsibility to contribute, as does the contractor: success is only possible through a well understood, clearly measured teaming between the organisations.
Managing the process of outsourced contracts and agreements
1. Introduction Maintenance is a lifetime of sustained effort to ensure that the assets of a company continue to provide a service that will ensure that the organisation can provide its designated service. As a consequence a maintenance contract has very different business goals from the provision of services through construction or a one-off engineering exercise. The key goals for such a contract include:
Research - Papers - Maintenance Systems :
RISK MANAGEMENT VERSUS COST MANAGEMENT
Dr. R A Platfoot
Covaris Pty Ltd
Summary: This paper describes the necessary trade-off between risk management and cost management in a modern, performance-based maintenance contract. Risk management is achieved by an effective, procedural-based PM system implemented using a scheduling process and observing a previously developed resource plan. Through competitive tendering, the resources available to implement this plan are lean – the primary cost driver in such contracts being the scheduled labour commitments. As a consequence a maintenance strategy needs to be clearly established that sets out the task areas for the work force, and then drives a detailed maintenance plan, which in turn drops cards into the regular schedule. A case study describing this process is included where the bulk of the work is made up of PM tasks with little allowance required for corrective maintenance
.Spare Parts Optimisation in Maintenance Improvement
M. Adra
Kilpatrick Green Facility Management
6 Korio Quay Road
Geelong Victoria 3215
R.A. Platfoot
University of New South Wales
Sydney NSW 2052
The management and associated costs of inventory is an area of increasing concern. In the case study presented in this paper, considerable effort was allocated to managing the stores holdings in a cost effective way. The task remains to continually balance the investment in holdings versus avoiding costs due to not having a spare immediately available. A risk based approach was adopted to assign a level of criticality to a spare in order to determine whether or not to continue holding it. However, even after establishing a criticality system, it was proven necessary to implement an ongoing audit process which refreshed the required holding levels.
The Benefits of Practicing Enterprise Risk Reduction
R.A. Platfoot
University of New South Wales
Sydney NSW 2052
Risk management is a pervasive tool which can be employed by both production and maintenance groups as a basis for communicating a perception and to use a priority-setting tool in the absence of detailed information. Used correctly, the quantifiable description of risk such as a risk level or safety index, can streamline work and consequent investment to provide that work. This paper describes a simple approach to quantifiable risk assessment which can be tailored for smaller companies and form the basis for more sophisticated approaches by larger organisations. Examples and systems are provided as to how the recognition of risk can be exploited in optimising maintenance systems.
FROM REACTIVE MAINTENANCE TO PROACTIVE PREVENTIVE MAINTENANCE SYSTEM
S Safi1 & S Mozar1,2
1Covaris Pty Ltd 2PhD Candidate Macquarie Graduate School of Management Summary: A maintenance system is presented in this paper that has been implemented in a number of companies. The system has four key elements. The first element is specifying all equipment to be maintained in a hierarchical system, covering issues such as criticality of equipment. The second element is development of an efficient but comprehensive maintenance procedure database. The next key element is provision of a master maintenance schedule that ensures all registered equipment is covered by an appropriate procedure. The last element is implementation of the maintenance system through load-up to a computerized maintenance management system (CMMS) of choice. The main outcomes from introducing the proactive preventive maintenance system includes moving the site from breakdown maintenance to preventative maintenance, ensuring that all statutory compliance obligations are met, eliminating frequent causes of loss of reliability and reducing the cost of maintenance. Keywords: Maintenance System, Breakdown Maintenance, Preventative Maintenance, Scheduling, Change Management
.PREDICTIVE MAINTENANCE ACTIVITIES IN THE CONTEXT OF A MAINTENANCE STRATEGY REVIEW
Dr. R A Platfoot
Covaris Pty Ltd
Summary: This paper presents material associated with assessing the effectiveness of a variety of condition monitoring approaches within the context of a predictive/preventative maintenance strategy. It promotes the concept that earlier thinking on the application of RCM may need to be assessed in the light of the growth of lower cost predictive maintenance and life forecasting technologies, and hence whether or not primary outcomes of tools such as FMECA need to be further skewed to embrace more fully the details and attributes of various life assessment possibilities. The application of RCM Turbo as an automated/semi-electronic diary approach to employing RCM is tested for relevant aspects such as the application of its criticality scores to assigning equipment criticality rankings within the maintenance system, thereby assisting the scheduling and prioritization of predictive maintenance tasks.
Quality Manual for Maintenance
O. McKenzie Skilled Engineering
850 Whitehorse Road
Box Hill Victoria 3128
R.A. Platfoot
University of New South Wales
Sydney NSW 2052
A quality document for maintenance was developed to assist project managers for a contract maintenance provider to understand the requirements for the delivery of their services. The manual was intended to form part of the quality system of the company, bridging between the general procedures observed under ISO9000 and the day-to-day running of the operation. The methods and systems incorporated into the document cover work flow, reliability analysis, inspections, the CMMS and financial management.
Research - Papers - Maintenance Engineering Bureau Service :
PROACTIVE VERSUS REACTIVE
MAINTENANCE
MEASUREMENT/IMPROVEMENT
B Bigdeli & S Safi
Covaris Pty Ltd
Summary: successful maintenance improvement projects in large organisations require a systematic and well-founded approach to ensure tangible technical outcomes. A structured
maintenance data analysis has been developed to address key maintenance objectives known as proactive maintenance, backlog management and failure mode analysis. Maintenance data (i.e. work orders) for one fiscal year 2002/2003 in a large Alumina refinery is investigated in an attempt to established short, medium and long-term maintenance improvement strategies. Data set included more than 61,000 individual work orders with a total amount of actual cost recorded as high as $63m with more than 330,000 hours of actual work registered in the CMMS. Such a structured analysis has led to specific set of recommendations for improvements in planning and scheduling of works, PM strategies for number of critical assets, new backlog management strategy and engineering investigations into major failure modes. Since delivering the full report, several of these improvement initiatives have been successfully implemented, and few others are being considered for implementation. Keywords: Maintenance Improvement, PM Strategies, Backlog Management, FMEA
MAINTENANCE ENGINEERING BUREAU USING MAINTENANCE DATA TO DRIVE IMPROVEMENT
S Safi & B Bigdeli
Covaris Pty Ltd
Summary: This paper presents an objective methodology for maintenance data analysis. The
purposes of these analyses are to identify strengths and weaknesses in the maintenance
management system, opportunities for improvements, and benchmark maintenance key elements
against maintenance best practice. A wide range of reports can be provided from analysing the data
from computerised maintenance management systems. These reports can be categorised as
Performance Reports, Benchmarking Reports, Optimisation Reports, and Data Integrity Reports.
Failure Modes and Effect Analysis is one of the main outcomes of the maintenance engineering
bureau services. This analysis is an easy to use and yet powerful, proactive maintenance
engineering method, which can identify potential failure modes, determine their effect on the
maintenance costs, and identify actions to mitigate the failures. The results of the analyses of the
various maintenance system data sets based on the developed methodology are presented.
Keywords: Maintenance Systems, Maintenance Reporting, FMEA, Weibull Analysis.