Maintenance Mail

Welcome to the first edition of a regular Covaris Newsletter,
written by the staff at Covaris.
If you would like additional copies to pass on to
colleagues, or if you would like to be included on our mailing list,
if you would like our panel of engineers to explore a particular
maintenance topic, or if you have any comments at all, please
contact the editor Dereck Turner at d.turner@covaris.com.au,
Fax your details to (02) 9708 6654 or phone direct 0416 044
482.
Many factories and production facilities shut down
production over the Christmas holiday period. This then
becomes the busy period for the Maintenance crew, who rush
to overhaul equipment that has been “band-aided” for the past
few months, or is due for its “annual rebuild”.
Now that we are well into the 2006 production year,
and the post-Christmas shutdown is a faded memory, it might
be time to start planning for your next shutdown. Too early?
Think about how well your shutdown progressed? Were there
jobs found, where you might have said, “If only we knew about
this in October?” or, “If only we could have got the spare
parts in time?” Were maintenance personnel tripping over
each other in their rush to have the plant ready for Production
in early January? And when production started, how many
further problems did you encounter – partial blockages in pipes,
conveyors tracking off-centre, or with squealing bearings?
Editorial by
Dereck Turner
Dereck Turner is an Instrument
and Control Engineer with thirty years
experience in the Maintenance Industry.
He has worked as a Maintenance
Manager for Sydney Water, as well as
commercial production industries. He is
a Maintenance Analyst, specialising in
electrical maintenance procedures and
machine safety.
For More Information Contact: Covaris Pty Ltd
Suite 22/1-5 Jacobs Street,
Bankstown NSW 2200
Australia,
PO Box 3456,
Bankstown Square, NSW 2200
Phone: +61 2 9708 6652,
Fax: +61 2 9708 6654
contact@covaris.com.au
www.COVARIS.com.au

Shut down maintenance requires a special type of
planning, planning that starts well before the shut-down,
and continues through the shut-down to start-up. Production
personnel also have a role to play. It’s too easy to get the last
batch of product out to the warehouse on Christmas eve, switch
everything off and head out the door, when time spent fl ushing
product out of those pipes, reporting conveyor problems
and performing a planned close down might well save many
headaches when production is resumed.
As I travel to factories and facilities to assist with
analysing their maintenance performance, I am intrigued by
the various levels of cooperation achieved by the maintenance
and production groups. It runs the gamut from open hostility
[“Maintenance personnel don’t know how to fi x our machines
properly” – “Production personnel don’t know how to run
their machines properly.”] to mutual cooperation, where
production personnel will perform simple maintenance tasks,
and maintenance personnel will assist with running machinery.
The source of this teamwork (or lack of it) appears dependant
on attitudes built up over time, invariably engendered by
management policies. How do we solve it?
These subjects, and more will be discussed in future issues of
MAINTENANCE MAIL.

Maintenance History Facts

The Aqueducts of Rome

During the period of Augustus Caesar’s reign
in Rome, the maintenance of the aqueducts became
a greater focus, as the population neared one million
people and the strains on the already fragile aqueducts
became more evident. Augustus assigned M. Vipsanius
Agrippa to carry out maintenance on the water facilities
of Rome. The aqueducts by this time were over a century
old, and so the need of his services was great. Agrippa
resigned to a lower post to put all his concentration on
the maintenance and restoration of the aqueducts, and
using his own funds and slaves set up a committee
for this task to be completely realised. Agrippa was
fi rst charged to restore the Aqua Marcia in 34BC, and
continued in 33BC to restore the other aqueducts, Appia,
Anio Vetus, and Marcia, and joined another Tepula with
a new aqueduct system, Julia. Upon his death, Agrippa
left his slaves that made up the committee to the state as
a legacy for further maintenance on the aqueducts and
the Roman water system.
Information from http://ancienthistory.about.com/library/bl/uc_schlaf1.
htm originally written by Al Schlaf

In a typical reactive system most of the effort of the
maintenance team is spent on responding to breakdowns. There is
little or no planned maintenance activity, and work is prioritised
in a random manner (responding to breakdowns) with no regard
to the business drivers. Such a regime keeps the organization
operational, but at a very high cost. The cost is high due to the
unplanned stoppages in production that are frequently associated
with time lost in obtaining spares to complete the repair. In
such a regime it is diffi cult to complete preventive maintenance
procedures (PM) as maintenance staff are constantly responding
to breakdowns (BD). Very little if any time is allocated to PM
work. The unpredictable and random nature of breakdowns does
not allow work to be planned. Frequently such systems do not
keep records of work done that would enable reliability engineers
to attack major reliability issues.
A proactive maintenance system is not free of breakdowns,
but the breakdown can be related to the organization’s business
drivers via assigned criticalities. A piece of equipment that
has a low criticality assigned to it can be scheduled into next
weeks planned activities. A proper managed maintenance
plan allows capacity to attend to urgent breakdowns, i.e. those
with a high criticality. It also allows the maintenance team to
control the maintenance activity, rather than to be controlled by
it. Equipment that receives adequate maintenance is less likely
to fail, which makes it possible to have planned maintenance
down time. Planned down time is far less costly than unplanned
down time and does not have the associated loss and poor
quality product associated with a BD. If a breakdown occurs
on equipment that has been regularly maintained, the damage
is generally not as bad as that on poorly maintained equipment.
Apart from eliminating the operational inconvenience associated
with a breakdown regime, a proactive maintenance system also
results in a more cost effective maintenance system. A proactive
maintenance system, as implemented by Covaris in a number
of organizations and in a variety of industries, has four key
elements.
The fi rst element is a plant dictionary that has all
maintainable equipment listed in hierarchical form. The next
element is the development of a comprehensive and effi cient
maintenance procedure database, which should also include
safety procedures as they relate to maintenance tasks. The
third element is a master schedule that ensures all registered
equipment is covered by an appropriate procedure. The last
element is monitoring maintenance management system with a
reporting system.
The proactive
maintenance system is not
the end of an improvement
journey. Rather it is the
fi rst step in gaining control.
Continuous improvement
requires constant effort,
and a good starting point
is collection of reliability
data, which can be stored
and retrieved as required
for reliability analysis.
The reliability analysis of
equipment should be linked
to the business drivers. For
example there is very little benefi t in spending effort studying
failure patterns on equipment that are of low criticality to the
business. The pay out can be very signifi cant however, if this
energy is channelled into analysing the failure of a piece of
equipment that is critical to the business. Sometimes even
a very small improvement can have a substantial impact
on the business. The point is that the more critical a piece
of equipment is to the business, the more attention it should
receive.
One thing that should not be forgotten in this
discussion is that without the support of top and middle
management, the best intentions and strategies will not bear
fruit. Top management must provide the vision and make a
commitment to support the improvement initiatives and ensure
that adequate resources are made available in order to achieve
agreed goals. The change can only be brought about with the
support of the management and the effective communication
of the organizations goals to all employees.
Reactive Maintenance
vs.
Proactive Maintenance System
Article By:
Dr. Seyed A. Safi
Seyed Safi is a Mechanical Engineer. His original research
was in aerodynamic and structural engineering. Recently he is working
on various projects in Maintenance Systems. He is responsible for
implementing maintenance systems at a number of sites and is the
maintenance procedures document manager for the company. He is
the Program Manager - Services, working in the core Covaris service
programs.
A colleague was invited to deliver a paper at a maintenance
conference in Japan. He prepared meticulously, aware
of his reputation as a very good speaker. However, at the
conference, he was surprised that his audience did not react
at all to any of his technical brilliance or his perfectly timed
jokes and witticisms. In fact, the audience did not react to
anything he said.
Somewhat put down, he went back to his seat and a Japanese
gentleman appeared on the podium. This man had a terrifi c
success! People applauded and laughed, and although the my
colleague could not understand one bit of what was said, he
started to applaud, as the man evidently deserved praise for
this perfect presentation.
However, he was interrupted by the chairman of the
conference: “No no, sir. You must not applaud!”
Dumbfounded he protested: “But why? This man is obviously
a very knowledgeable speaker.”
No sir, you must not applaud, he is translating your speech.”
So we’re reached the start of another calendar year. The
Christmas shutdown is complete and things are starting to settle
down again. How about taking this opportunity to spend a little
bit of time making the most of all that information you have
collected during the year?
Here’s a couple of analyses you can perform without
too much effort, and they will lead to real benefi ts in the
effectiveness of your store.
1. BOM Optimisation report.
•Using the movement history over the last year, and assuming
spares are issued to a work order or equipment reference, spares
can be listed according to the equipment they have been issued
to and BOMS updated as required
2. Min/Max review optimisation
• Given the usage history and known lead times for items,
stock can be optimised to ensure suffi cient stock is available
for reducing the risk of an out-of-stock occurrence, whilst also
ensuring reorder occurs no more frequently that fortnightly.
3. Bin location optimisation
• Why not ensure that the most commonly used items are near the
front of the store, minimising the time spent travelling walking
through the store
4. Cycle count optimisation.
• Instead of simply counting all materials on the same tie basis,
why not only count items regularly that are used regularly. Slow
moving stock can merely be counted at an annual stock-count.
Your usage history will point out which items can be excluded
from regular cycle counts.
5. Obsolescence identifi cation.
•This can be the hardest to truly identify, however if you go
looking through the historical usage of your stores items, and
you can identify a step change where stock is no longer used,
then the stock can be highlighted as a potential for removal
from stock. Fortunately this can be done with mathematical
algorithms, making the analysis simpler.
Engineering Stores
Article by:
Mr Andrew Banks
Andrew Banks is a Mechanical Engineer, who began his career in
maintenance and manufacturing in the Food Industry. Since then
he has been involved in SAP IT as a Supply Chain System Designer
implementing IT Systems throughout Australia and New Zealand.
Fun Stuff
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A common question asked of Covaris is what is
the correct balance of work we should be measuring in our
maintenance system. Over time we have put together the
following table to assist people as a generic guide. It must
be noted that when applying the proportions quoted here that
care has to be taken to allow for differences due to run down
equipment, processes that are highly abrasive or corrosive
(which mean higher breakdown rates) and other potential
reasons to skew an equipment base from the mean profi le.
Dr Bob’s Corner
Article by:
Dr Bob Platfoot
Bob Platfoot is a Mechanical Engineer, who originally
trained in the Australian power station industry and then joined
the University of NSW as an academic specialising in mechanical
design and maintenance engineering. He is the Managing Director
of the company and leads the strategic asset management program
as well as working in the other core service programs. His primary
expertise is in maintenance engineering, high level company assets
management strategy, and life assessment.
1. In Poor status the quantum of non-PM work registered is very
low
2. Medium is based on actual data from sites
3. Poor - Registered is based on actual data from sites for work
order numbers only
4.Good is based on intended balances of work
5.Proportions take into account mean differences in number of
hours per work order per work type
We have provided proportions in terms of number of
jobs (N jobs), the hours registered on jobs by the maintenance
work force and the cost of the work. We do not have data to
suggest the balance of costs for an organisation which is in a poor
state of maintenance. We have provided two sets of balances for
the state in where maintenance is poorly done. The fi rst balance
is what is typically seen in the maintenance data but the amount
of work recorded as work orders is quite low. The true state of
affairs is hence a little different, and this is shown by the Actual
balance recorded under poor.
How do you use this information – ask your people to
record out balances of work under the categories used above.
Our categories are based on what initiates a job, what is the
fundamental reason as to why the job has been created in the fi rst
place. We would like to hear back from people as to how they
believe their proportions look and at what state of maintenance
they consider themselves to be operating in.
What is poor, medium or good? Poor maintenance is
where less than 60% of the work is recorded as work orders
and breakdown maintenance is dominant, and the PMs that are
done are typically poorly engineered. Medium maintenance is
where all of the work is being recorded but there is still too high
a proportion of breakdown since the PMs and the relationships
between operating and maintenance people are not conducive
to effective and effi cient maintenance.
Tell us your story and engage with our research – we
would like to hear your feedback.
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