Category Archives: Maintenance & Reliability

Underappreciating and Misunderstanding the Reliability Engineer

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“In our organisation, Reliability Engineers are not utilized properly. Leadership do not understand what they should be doing, and they end up doing everything across the maintenance function, except what they should be doing – thinking about reliability and preventing failure”. HEAD OF MAINTENANCE AND RELIABILITY, ENGINEERING AND CONSTRUCTION This is an excerpt from the annual MAINSTREAM State of Asset Management Report, with detailed input from 255 participants from Australia and New Zealand representing a range of regions, industries, asset management maturity, and organisation sizes. Because the cost of failure is not great enough, business owners of most companies that participated in the survey still place greater emphasis on using systems and sweating assets rather than perfecting system reliability and eliminating asset failure at any cost. This results in a culture that has a higher risk appetite and bias to action, which is not a supportive environment for the natural reliability engineer. Strategic vs Tactical Research suggests that the predominant Myers Briggs personality for a reliability engineer is ISTJ. If you’re not familiar with Myers Briggs, this definition can be simplified as someone who is analytical, practical, reserved, direct, dutiful, insensitive, and not naturally drawn to people. Reliability engineers are more process driven than results orientated. They are required to think, design and be strategic. Their skills are not utilised effectively when they are asked to be tactical. The value we get from our reliability engineers is misunderstood. During down cycles we often move reliability engineers elsewhere in the plant to … Continue reading →

Maximizing the Success of your Digital Transformation Journey

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Contrary to popular opinion, maintenance and reliability can be a highly profitable investment, and not just a cost. But it takes courage to bridge the gap between the needs of the business and the ability of the workforce to execute in a secure and resilient environment. That’s what John Schultz has spent the last two decades doing. Regarded as one of the world’s best reliability educators, John has helped over 300 manufacturing locations save millions in direct costs while increasing production, improving quality, and reducing inventories. John has personally benchmarked over 1,000 locations. In summary, John has spent his entire career helping organizations to bridge the gap between the needs of the business and the ability of the workforce to execute in a secure and resilient environment. Or, in straight-talking language: Make more, break less, and don’t spend. Schultz recently presented at Mainstream OnAir 2021, a two day event for asset, reliability and maintenance professionals. His focus was how to maximise the success of your digital transformation journey. Here’s a summary of his session, What is Bootleg Innovation? Engage the three key Centres of Intelligence To enact lasting, sustainable change, Schultz advocates engaging the three Centres of Intelligence. The Thinking Centre of Intelligence is about the brain and includes aspects of your business like subject matter experts, content and technology. The Emotional Centre of Intelligence is about engaging the heart, encompassing change management, leadership and workforce engagement. “If you have an enabled and engaged workforce, you can tackle any problem,” says … Continue reading →

Risk Management is Boring: Brain Hacks to Protect Your Business

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One challenge for many businesses is the wonderfully unsexy world of risk management. Due to the overwhelming optimism of entrepreneurs, stopping the bad things happening can often be overlooked. However, when you let people rip you off, exploit your weaknesses or you just leave a small door open to be manipulated, it can be fatal, says Daniel Murray CEO of Empathic Consulting. Daniel gave the keynote address to over 400 people at Mainstream Conference 2019 in Melbourne, demonstrating the incredible power that empathy has to build business relationships in our digitally focused but disconnected age. In this article he gives us a different way to look at risk management and shares some ways to encourage people to engage their “moral compass” in order to self-regulate risk. It Turns Out We’re All Cheaters There were a number of interesting experiments conducted by professor Dan Ariely from MIT regarding cheating. They asked people to complete a challenging test, then they give them the answers to self-mark their effort, walk to the front of the room and shred their paper before telling the administrator the number of correct answers they correctly answered. They then receive payment for each correct answer. So, do people cheat? What was interesting was not that some people cheated, but that all people consistently cheated. Ariely had tampered with the shredder so they could check and indeed, almost all people cheated, not by a lot, but on average they increased the number of correct answers from 3 to 4 … Continue reading →

Realising the Benefits of Asset Optimisation

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The field of asset management and asset investment has moved into the spotlight. No longer on the fringes of business awareness, it has become a top strategic objective for organisations of all sizes. A key driver of this change is the spreading belief that optimising asset investment plans will deliver tangible benefits to organisations as well as the adoption of ISO 55000 across the globe. However, these drivers also create the challenge of living up to expectations as new, risk-based asset management practices are implemented and then supporting technologies to achieve the standards. Companies can meet that challenge by forecasting two futures, one based on how the organisation used to make decisions, and one based on the principles of advanced asset management. Push Toward ISO 55000 Compliance ISO 55000 stakes out two primary areas of benefit, financial performance and stakeholder value. Some of these benefits have direct dollar impacts, while others such as reputation and social responsibility are harder to quantify, though they clearly link to asset management activities. Most of the benefits are reliant on the hypothesis that an organisation can make better decisions by using risk as the basis for optimisation. This includes balancing short- and long-term goals, managing risk, improving sustainability, efficiency and effectiveness. All these benefits require an investment in process, data and software. The list of benefits from ISO 55000 may be long and seem obvious to asset managers, but eventually the investment in processes, people and technology will have to be justified to executives … Continue reading →

Sydney Water’s Data Strategy Makes the Insights Flow

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For Sydney Water’s five million customers, quality and satisfaction can simply mean pouring a clean glass of drinking water. But behind this seemingly basic concept, there’s a complex network of assets that are all underpinned by one thing: Data. Ahead of her session at Mainstream Conference, Tammy Falconer, Head of Asset Knowledge at Sydney Water, outlines the key steps they have taken to build a trusted data strategy and the benefits that are flowing onto their valued customers. Drowning in Data? Not at Sydney Water It’s easy to take for granted that Sydney-siders have access to some of the highest quality drinking water in the world, and that our wastewater disappears, just like that. Behind the scenes, there’s a huge number of assets delivering these services. We’ve been building and maintaining these assets for over 130 years to help make Sydney a liveable city and we’re passionate and proud of our role in shaping the lifestyle of Sydney, the Blue Mountains and the Illawarra for generations to come. With a long history, our older assets can provide unique challenges, particularly our underground assets where we don’t have easy access to the asset to verify the accuracy of the data. We need to take a targeted and cost-effective approach to improve the data quality of existing assets and at the same time ensure that any new data meets the standards we require. Focusing on Data Foundations We’ve taken a business capability approach to maximising the value of our data focusing on … Continue reading →

Devon Energy: A Data-Assisted Asset Integrity Approach

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In 2008, the combination of technical breakthroughs in directional drilling and hydraulic fracturing technologies started a wave of industry transformation and disruption that continues today. One US company at the forefront of this is Devon Energy, headquartered in Oklahoma City. A Fortune 500 oil and natural gas exploration and production company, Devon has some 3,400 employees and a capex of $US 2.4 billion. In Canada, Devon produces heavy oil through steam-assisted gravity drainage, producing some 35,000 barrels a day from each of three plants. Then there’s the horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) of shale oil deposits throughout the US. Working in some of the most adverse conditions in the world, Devon’s asset integrity approach is based on constantly monitoring data from its rigs. Data technology, along with team-building in its WellCon rig control centres, is not only improving drilling accuracy, but enabling the implementation of autonomous processes. Ben Williams, VP and CIO of Devon Energy, shared his insights into the company’s challenges and its asset integrity approach at this year’s Mainstream Conference. Asset Management in a Harsh Environment Williams says Devon has invested heavily in asset integrity because of the hazardous environments its rig locations present to workers and equipment. “Our asset integrity teams on the oil-producing plants have the unenviable problem of having to keep up with inspections on a highly complex asset,” Williams says. “They do inspections on pipelines and plants at times of the year when these are virtually inaccessible. The ground is like tundra, it … Continue reading →

5 Steps to Developing Critical Asset Strategy with ISO 55000 

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At the Mainstream Conference in 2017, Andrew Schweitzer, Cold Reduction Maintenance Strategist from BlueScope, spoke about how the company broke down the requirements of ISO 55000 to identify and develop a strategy for managing their critical equipment. Here are some of the takeaways from their journey to critical asset management strategy with ISO 55000.  Note: You can also listen to the full audio of this presentation, linked with slides here.  What Drove the Need for Implementing The ISO 55000 Standard at Bluescope? BlueScope is a large steel solutions, manufacturing and distribution company employing 9,000 employees across Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific.  During the global financial crisis in 2009 the company felt the pain of cutbacks, tight margins and export losses. They saw a transition to reactive maintenance and they were putting a lot of effort into activities that didn’t add value to the business. They were dealing with bottlenecks in processes, specifically following a move to SAP and with it, the transfer of uncleansed master data from a legacy system.  There was a need to implement a plan that would allow for better decision-making, risk mitigation, a better understanding of assets and critical management strategies – overall improved efficiency and effectiveness. This is when they decided to take a close look at ISO 55000 as a guide to improving the management of their assets.  The Four Fundamentals Bluescope chose four fundamentals from ISO 55000 that were most important to the company, and focused on those aspects as the cornerstones for driving improvement. These were:   Maximising the value the asset provides Alignment of the organisational objectives with the asset decision making Leadership and workplace culture  Assurance/confidence that the assets will deliver on targets  With these goals … Continue reading →

How to Tailor your Asset Management Metrics for Different Audiences

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One you’ve come up with the best measurement, chosen a score card, and started measuring your efforts, it’s time to report on it. But it depends on who the report is targeting as to what you should show and how you should present it. Whether you’re presenting metrics to your maintenance team, customers or management, there are different ways of effectively getting your message across. Here are my top tips for effectively presenting your metrics to different audiences in your organisation. The Maintenance Team Before you present anything to your maintenance team, you have to make sure that every person turning a wrench or putting a metre or something or lubricating something knows what they’re being measured on. You’re going to have a revolt on your hands if you show them a scorecard and say, “I’ve been measuring you on this, and by the way you’re not too good at it.” So let them know first, it’s absolutely critical. Show the summary page and discuss Dig into the details for any score that does not meet expectations Explain how achieving each metric benefits them or the company Ensure the team understands exactly how each metric is calculated   I always show my maintenance team a scorecard for the PM upfront. “Here’s what I expect on a PM, and here’s the questions we ask for each work order. Here’s what I expect when I go out and watch your job. I want to make sure that you had the part staged. … Continue reading →

How to Uncover Improvement Areas Based on Your Asset Management Maturity Level

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What’s the current level of your asset management program? Are you in the beginning stages? Is your program pretty good but you need improvement? Or do you already have a world-class program? Understanding where you are as an organisation is important as it will determine the right direction for your asset management improvements. If you are just starting out, there is no point trying to implement improvements as if you were a world class operation. And even if you already have a world-class maintenance program, there are still things you can focus on to get better. Here are some questions based on the three stages of maturity (basic, sustaining and world class) that will help you determine areas of focus for improvement: Basic If you’re starting out with the basics of asset management, you need to make sure you’re your database is solid and your foundation is set. Do you have a Computerised Maintenance Management System (CMMS)? e.g. an SAP, a Maximo, a program you’re using to write, close, and track work orders Is there an equipment naming convention? Is critical equipment defined and identified? Do standard work instructions exist? Are there PMs for critical equipment? Is there a method to manage instrumentation? Is work planned and scheduled? Do you have a skills matrix? Does a system to manage spare parts exist? If you are starting out as a maintenance organisation or you don’t have some of these basics, these are the areas you should be focusing on – start by … Continue reading →

The Stats Are In: Less Is More When It Comes to Maintenance Spending

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What if I told you the top performing asset management companies spend less money on maintenance and get better results from an operations perspective. Sounds too good to be true, right? According to data from Solomon and Associates, this is absolutely the case. Solomon and Associates are the gold standard of benchmarking, particularly in the oil industry. 98% of the refineries in the world subscribe to the Solomon Study, and executives make decisions based on their standing in the Solomon ratings. … Continue reading →